Leveraging knowledge as a competitive asset? The intensity, performance and structure of universities’ entrepreneurial knowledge exchange activities at a regional level

© 2016, The Author(s). Universities are no longer considered to be isolated islands of knowledge, but as institutions increasingly engaged with a range of external partners through entrepreneurial activities. This paper examines the associations between the intensity and performance of knowledge exchange activities undertaken in UK universities with non-academic actors. Drawing on data concerning the structural factors of interactions of universities in the UK with external partners, the paper sheds further light on the nature of these activities through a prism of competitive and uncompetitive regions in order to better understand how universities may be able to leverage both their knowledge and partnerships more effectively as competitive assets. On the one hand, it is found that academics in uncompetitive regions are more intensively engaged in entrepreneurial activities but generate less income from them than their counterparts in competitive regions, suggesting that there are differences in the income-generating capacity of academics across regions. On the other hand, academic knowledge is found to be more strongly bounded within a certain distance in uncompetitive regions whilst geographical distance seems less of a hindrance to academics in competitive regions

Forget R&D – pay my coach: young innovative companies and their relations with universities

32 p., 8 tables and referencesYoung innovative companies (YICs) are attracting attention in their role of industry regenerators. However, we have little information about their relations with universities as sources of information. This paper explores university-industry interaction involving YIC in the Valencian Community, using YIC founders’ personal attributes and motivations as explanatory variables. The Valencian Community has a relatively high degree of university-industry interaction, but surprisingly little technological innovation. A survey of YICs in the region shows that, in their case, firm size does not affect the probability of contracting with universities, and that R&D intensity is not significant if we consider firm founders’ personal characteristics and motivations. YIC founders exploiting market opportunities recognized in previous business activities, and necessity entrepreneurs, are the least likely to interact with universities. We highlight the role of external advisory services to highlight the benefits of universities.Peer reviewe

Access to universities’ public knowledge: who’s more nationalist?

[EN] Access to public knowledge is a prerequisite for the good functioning of developed economies. Universities strive and are also requested to contribute to this knowledge both locally and internationally. Traditional studies on the geography of knowledge flows have identified a localisation effect; however, these studies do not use the country as the unit of observation and hence do not explore national patterns. In this paper, we hypothesise that the localisation of university knowledge flows is directly related to share of firm expenditure on research and development. To test this hypothesis, we use references to universities in patent documents as indicators based on a data set of around 20,000 university references, for 37 countries in the period 1990–2007, resulting in panels of around 300–500 observations. We build indicators for the university knowledge flows both inside and outside the applicant country, which we explain as a function of some proxies for national size and research structure based on econometric estimations. We draw some conclusions as to the importance of national business scientific strength for fostering increased domestic university knowledge flows.This research was initiated with the framework of ERAWATCH, a joint initiative of the European Commission's Directorate General for Research and the Joint Research Centre-Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS). The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Commission (EC). Neither the EC nor anyone acting on behalf of the EC is responsible for the use that might be made of the information. I am grateful to Rene van Bavel and Xabier Goenaga for their support and to Laura de Dominicis for exchange of ideas. I am also grateful to the international consortium that produced the database, including Henry Etzkowitz, Marina Ranga and members of Incentim and CWTS, led, respectively, by Bart Van Looy and Robert J.W. Tijssen. Previous versions of the paper were presented at the Triple Helix VIII International Conference on University, Industry and Government Linkages and the IPTS Workshop "The Output of R&D activities: Harnessing the Power of Patents Data-II'', and I acknowledge helpful comments from the audiences. My colleagues at INGENIO also provided useful comments on a seminar presentation. I also gratefully acknowledge support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the Spanish National Research Council to the project "Access to the public knowledge base'' (ref. 201010I004).Azagra Caro, JM. (2012). Access to universities public knowledge: Who s more nationalist?. Scientometrics. 91(3):671-679. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-012-0629-5671679913Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C. 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Industrial and Corporate Change, 10(4), 975–1005.Breschi, S., & Lissoni, F. (2005). Knowledge networks from patent data. In H. F. Moed, W. Glänzel, U. Schmoch (Eds.), Handbook of quantitative science and technology research (pp. 613–643). Dordrecht: KluwerBreschi, S., & Malerba, F. (1997). Sectoral innovation systems: Technological regimes, Shumpeterian dynamics, and spatial boundaries. In C. Edquist (Ed.), Systems of innovation: Technologies, institutions and organizations (ch. 6). Londres and Washington: Pinter.Callaert, J., van Looy, B., Verbeek, A., Debackere, K., & Thus, B. (2006). Traces of prior art: An analysis of non-patent references found in patent documents. Scientometrics, 69(1), 3–20.Criscuolo, P., & Verspagen, B. (2008). Does it matter where patent citations come from? Inventor vs. examiner citations in European patents. Research Policy, 37(10), 1892–1908.EC (2007). Commission Green Paper ‘The European Research Area: New Perspectives’, COM(2007) p. 161.Feldman, M. P. (1999). The new economics of innovation, spillovers and agglomeration: A review of empirical studies. Economics of Innovation and New Technology, 8(1), 5–25.Greene, W. H. (2002). LIMDEP Version 8.0 econometric modeling guide 2. Plainview, NY: Econometric Software, Inc.Guellec, D., & van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie, B. (2001). The internationalisation of technology analysed with patent data. Research Policy, 30, 1253–1266.Hu, A. G. Z., & Jaffe, A. B. (2003). Patent citations and international knowledge flow: The cases of Korea and Taiwan. International Journal of Industrial Organization, 21(6), 849–880.Jaffe, A. B., & Trajtenberg, M. (1996). Flows of knowledge from universities and federal labs: Modeling the flow of patent citations over time and across institutional and geographic boundaries. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 93, 12671–12677.Jaffe, A. B., & Trajtenberg, M. (1999). International knowledge flows: Evidence from patent citations. 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Identifying author–inventors from Spain: methods and a first insight into results

The aim of this paper is to describe a matching and disambiguation methodology for the identification of author-inventors located in the same country. It aims to maximize precision and recall rates by taking into account national name writing customs in the name matching stage and by including a recursive validation step in the person disambiguation stage. An application to the identification of Spanish author-inventors is described in detail, where all SCOPUS 2003-2008 publications of Spanish authors are matched to all 1978-2009 EPO applications with Spanish inventors. Using this data, we identify 4,194 Spanish author-inventors. A first look at their patenting and publication patterns reveal that Spanish author-inventors make quite a significant contribution to the overall country’s scientific and technological production in the time periods considered: 27% of all EPO patent applications invented in Spain and 15% of all SCOPUS scientific articles authored in Spain, with important differences across fields and excluding journals in non-technologically relevant fields.Peer reviewe