The embedding of universities in innovation ecosystems: The case of marine research at the University of Bergen

While historically the core missions of universities have been research and teaching, it has become increasingly recognised that universities have become significant sources of knowledge and capabilities. This third mission is cementing the role of universities as suppliers of qualified labour and generators of knowledge and technologies that promote innovation in a variety of innovation ecosystems. The main goal of the paper is to illustrate an approach that captures the various contributions of universities to their innovation ecosystems. Often territorially bounded, such links provide insights into the characteristics and geography of the various linkage for a university. With the case of the University of Bergen and its role within the marine innovation ecosystem of Western Norway, this ‘ecosystem fingerprint’, can be seen as a useful means to clarify the third mission of universities through the linkages and interdependencies with various actors. The authors demonstrate that a university can act both as a global pipeline provider and take active part in the local buzz, providing this concept with new empirical insight. The authors conclude that the university is highly embedded in both the marine innovation ecosystem and the knowledge ecosystem, but with linkages extended to interconnected business ecosystems.publishedVersio

Technological agglomeration and the emergence of clusters and networks in nanotechnology

Research and development at the nanoscale requires a large degree of integration, from convergence of research disciplines in new fields of enquiry to new linkages between start-ups, regional actors and research facilities. Based on the analysis of two clusters in nanotechnologies (MESA+ (Twente) and other centres in The Netherlands and Minatec in Grenoble in France), the paper discusses the phenomenon of technological agglomeration: co-located scientific and technological fields associated to coordinated technology platforms to some extent actively shaped by institutional entrepreneurs. Such co-location and coordination are probably a prerequisite for the emergence of strong nanocluster

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Risk profiles and one-year outcomes of patients with newly diagnosed atrial fibrillation in India: Insights from the GARFIELD-AF Registry.

BACKGROUND: The Global Anticoagulant Registry in the FIELD-Atrial Fibrillation (GARFIELD-AF) is an ongoing prospective noninterventional registry, which is providing important information on the baseline characteristics, treatment patterns, and 1-year outcomes in patients with newly diagnosed non-valvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF). This report describes data from Indian patients recruited in this registry. METHODS AND RESULTS: A total of 52,014 patients with newly diagnosed AF were enrolled globally; of these, 1388 patients were recruited from 26 sites within India (2012-2016). In India, the mean age was 65.8 years at diagnosis of NVAF. Hypertension was the most prevalent risk factor for AF, present in 68.5% of patients from India and in 76.3% of patients globally (P < 0.001). Diabetes and coronary artery disease (CAD) were prevalent in 36.2% and 28.1% of patients as compared with global prevalence of 22.2% and 21.6%, respectively (P < 0.001 for both). Antiplatelet therapy was the most common antithrombotic treatment in India. With increasing stroke risk, however, patients were more likely to receive oral anticoagulant therapy [mainly vitamin K antagonist (VKA)], but average international normalized ratio (INR) was lower among Indian patients [median INR value 1.6 (interquartile range {IQR}: 1.3-2.3) versus 2.3 (IQR 1.8-2.8) (P < 0.001)]. Compared with other countries, patients from India had markedly higher rates of all-cause mortality [7.68 per 100 person-years (95% confidence interval 6.32-9.35) vs 4.34 (4.16-4.53), P < 0.0001], while rates of stroke/systemic embolism and major bleeding were lower after 1 year of follow-up. CONCLUSION: Compared to previously published registries from India, the GARFIELD-AF registry describes clinical profiles and outcomes in Indian patients with AF of a different etiology. The registry data show that compared to the rest of the world, Indian AF patients are younger in age and have more diabetes and CAD. Patients with a higher stroke risk are more likely to receive anticoagulation therapy with VKA but are underdosed compared with the global average in the GARFIELD-AF. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION-URL: http://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT01090362

Co-evolutionary scenarios: An application to prospecting futures of the responsible development of nanotechnology

Potentially breakthrough science and technologies promise applications which may radically affect society. Nanotechnology is no exception, promising many benefits through nano-enabled applications across multiple sectors and with the potential of affecting many parts of our society.\ud \ud At present, during its early stages, a wide variety of actors are anticipating both on the potential benefits and risks of the development of nanotechnologies and their embedment into markets and into society.\ud \ud Those wishing to coordinate and develop appropriate governance strategies for nanotechnologies need to consider both the wide spectrum of nanotechnology research and development lines, the governance landscape surrounding nanotechnology and the application areas it will affect, and how these may co-evolve with each other.\ud \ud This paper presents a research project that took the recent activities in and around the notion of Responsible Research and Innovation of nanotechnologies as an opportunity to develop support tools for exploring potential co-evolutions of nanotechnology and governance arrangements. This involved the inclusion of pre-engagement analysis of potential co-evolutions in the form of scenarios into interactive workshop activities, with the aim of enabling multi-stakeholder anticipation of the complexities of co-evolution

Multi-path mapping for alignment strategies in emerging science and technologies

Roadmapping serves both short and long term (strategic) alignment in science and technology (S&T). Forecasts of the likely future development of S&T are generated; then research and development (R&D) efforts necessary to realize various goals are backcast. But for new and emerging S&T this trusted principle does not work: the likely products are not articulated yet. A promising approach however is building mapping tools based on underlying patterns and indicators of the dynamics of emergence. This paper discusses, based on a first round application in the field of micro and nanotechnologies for single cell analysis, the methodology of such a new approach. The work is linked to a programme of Future oriented Technology Assessment (FTA) activities coordinated within a European nanotechnology research network.\ud \ud Our paper addresses well-known lacunae of alignment tools from the viewpoints of the path creation/dependency literatures. We then apply these insights to lab-on-a-chip devices for cell analysis. Dynamics of emerging paths can be used to articulate a future structured in terms of prospective innovation chains and potential paradigms. We demonstrate a plausible variety of paths, which provides a broader set of strategic choices. This enables management of expectations and hype by which emerging S&T are characterised, and leads to alignment of actors. Our tool can be applied in strategic management of research and R&D at the level of science-to-industry networks. These are becoming an important element in European S&T policy but will only be successful if ways are found for closing gaps in the innovation chain

Market formation in the context of transitions: A comment on the transitions agenda

International audienc

Market formation in the context of transitions: A comment on the transitions agenda

International audienc

Conceptualizing market formation for transformative policy

Transitions are hardly conceivable without understanding how new markets are formed. However, there is still an incipient conceptualization of market formation in the context of transformation and transformative policy. Drawing on existing perspectives of market formation in economics of innovation, sociology of markets and marketing studies literature, this paper develops a framework for characterizing, differentiating and analyzing new market formation processes. We use three case studies to demonstrate how the framework is able to capture the dynamic and interconnected nature of market formation. The market formation framework serves to diagnose potential misalignments, bottlenecks and failures, to identify entry points for policy to intervene in market formation and support transformative innovation