Final Report Summary - ARDIS (Academic Researchers Driving Innovation Systems)
Academic researchers drive innovation systems. This particularly holds for academic researchers working at universities of technology as they do not only conduct fundamental research but also contribute substantially to technology and innovation. The analysis of the project has three major distinguishing characteristics: One, the theoretical analysis is interdisciplinary as the perspectives of two disciplines, i.e. Economic Geography and Economics of Innovation, are combined. Therefore, literature on knowledge regions, creative milieus, clusters, social capital, innovation systems and social network theory have been combined. Two, the empirical analysis is based on a comparison of five leading European universities of science and technology, including a British, Dutch, French, German and Swiss university. Three different empirical da-tasets were explored: interviews, surveys and publications. A) Based on the theoretical insights a list of questions for carrying out the semi-structured interviews at the five European universities of technology were developed. The so-called matched-pair-analysis eventually resulted in 45 interviews: at each university an academic with the same disciplinary background was inter-viewed. Nine matches were created, three of scholars working in the so-called Bohr’s quadrant of mainly basic research, three in the so-called Pasteur’s quadrant of use-inspired research, and three in the so-called Edison’s quadrant of mainly applied research (see Table 1). For details on these concepts please refer to Stokes, Donald E. 1997. Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation. Washington DC (U.S.A.): Brookings Institution Press. The interviews took between 50 and 120 minutes, most of them lasted about an hour. B) Founded on the results from the interviews a web-based questionnaire for the survey was developed. This questionnaire was sent to the scientific staff members with a PhD degree at three of the five universities of technology which gave permission to do so. C) The publication analysis focused on the very important and at the same time very diverse field of nanotechnology. Here, the positions and relationships of academic researchers at the five leading universities of technology were analysed related to the worldwide nanotechnology network. Three, the theory-driven empirical ap-proach combines both quantitative, i.e. social network analysis and bibliometric analysis, and qualitative research methods.
RWTH Aachen TU Delft Imperial College London ETH Zü-rich Paris Tech Number of interviewees
Basic research 3 3 3 3 3 5
Use-inspired research 3 3 3 3 3 5
Applied research 3 3 3 3 3 5
Total of interviewees per univers. 9 (2) 9 (1) 9 (0) 9 (2) 9 (0) 45 (5)
Table 1: Distribution of type of research of interviewees at the five leading universities of technology. (Figures in brackets give the number of female academics amongst the interviewees.)
The project has produced four major results, i.e. types of academics depending on discipline, dependence of collaborations on social and personal aspects, factors of academic performance, as well as value conflicts emerging in university-industry relationships . First, the analyses showed that academic scholars working at science or engineering departments differ considerably in the way they tap into and create knowledge, build, maintain and use networks in order to meet their research goals. They diverge quite substantially in their approach – depending on their research field, their personal preferences and their career stage. While academic scholars conducting mostly applied research rely on a regional and national network, scholars engaged in mostly user-inspired or mostly basic research rely on an international network, very often with a regional or local basis. Not surprisingly, scholars working mostly on applied or user-inspired projects have more contacts with firms and also governmental agencies. At the same time all scholars from all areas of research stress the importance of publications as output. Those with close industry contacts rather use obtained results as inspiration for further research projects, which result in publications and PhD students graduating. Patents play no or a minor role as output, because scholars do not aim at producing patents. The returns on investment are usually small and do not justify the costs.
Second, collaboration of academics is very much enabled by personal and social aspects. In par-ticular, the cohesion factors of trust, sympathy and reciprocity help establishing and maintaining collaborations even across larger organizational, technological and geographical distances. In particular, we identified a new concept, i.e. personal proximity, suggesting that interpersonal chemistry might enhance the productivity of collaborations. Here, our empirical evidence is scarce so that there has to be collected more data to come to more substantiated results.
Three, the performance of academics researchers developing and deploying nanotechnology de-pends on various individual and collective factors. For all researchers in the worldwide nano-technology network we find the following: One, researchers better connected in their direct envi-ronment and in the overall structure of the network perform better. Two, interdisciplinarity of researchers’ work is a crucial driver of performance. Putting one and two together indicate that interdisciplinary work of locally and globally well-connected researchers pushes the frontier of technological knowledge by providing novel solutions to open questions in the researchers’ own sub-network, and even more so, by providing well-known solutions to problems from other sub-networks. Three, this particularly holds for general purposes research organizations, such as the five leading universities of technology particularly analyzed here. They occupy an interesting intermediate position in the overall network. Researchers affiliated to them are neither very cen-tral in the network nor very close to the periphery. This seems to be a fruitful location for this kind of organization: Researchers affiliated to one of the five leading European universities of technology analyzed here. They are substantially more often cited and link larger and more in-ternational communities of researchers. They are slightly less productive in terms of publication output though. We suggest that this has mostly to do with the fact that in contrast to other parts of the world, in Europe the contributions of PhD students and junior staff members is acknowl-edged by making them co-author.
Four, in the applied sciences and in engineering there is often a significant overlap between aca-demic research and industry. Both academia and industry have a crucial role to play in achieving important societal goals. For the individual scholar, this may lead to serious conflicts when (s)he is working on joint university-industry projects. Differences in goals, such as universities aiming at disseminating knowledge while industry aiming at appropriating knowledge, might lead to multifaceted situations. With the help of the value-sensitive design approach we disentangle the values of researchers working in industry and those working at universities In particular, we identify possible conflicts between values of universities and of industry and suggest how they may be resolved by handling comprehensive rules that are reflected upon with colleagues and other stakeholders in the research process.
These insights regarding patterns, dynamics and effects of knowledge-intensive networking of academic researchers convey chances and bottlenecks in innovation systems. They will help aca-demic researchers, university management and policy makers to improve the research efficiency and output of the European Research Area. Based on these results, individual researchers, uni-versity management as well as science and technology policy makers might want to re-design their support for networking activities. In particular, they might want to design measures and policies in a way that the different needs of scholars regarding their networks is reflected. Exam-ples would be to stimulate faculty meetings with regional and national firms and governmental agencies for departments dominated by applied research projects and to stimulate international strategically important contacts for scholars working mainly on user inspired or basic research projects. Moreover, they might wish to reconsider their efforts to stimulate patenting at universi-ties, as even the few researchers patenting in our sample do it only as a side product. In order to help resolving value conflicts university management and policy makers may wish to stimulate regular discussions about specific cases regarding value clashes in collaborations.