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A bibliometric tool to assess the regional dimension of university–industry research collaborations

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Abstract

The present study proposes a bibliometric methodology for measuring the grade of correspondence between regional industry’s demand for research collaboration and supply from public laboratories. The methodology also permits measurement of the intensity and direction of the regional flows of knowledge in public–private collaborations. The aim is to provide a diagnostic instrument for regional and national policy makers, which could add to existing ones to plan interventions for re-balancing sectorial public supply of knowledge with industrial absorptive capacity, and maximizing appropriability of knowledge spillovers. The methodology is applied to university–industry collaborations in the hard sciences in all Italian administrative regions.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that in addition to universities, research institutes also contribute to the production of new knowledge, but are not fully considered in this work. The current work is primarily intended to describe a measurement system and provide an example of its application to the Italian case: the results should be interpreted in this sense.

  2. Legislation in 2001 introduced the so called “academic privilege”, presumably resulting in additional patents filed by university researchers, but relevant data are not readily available, making the identification of joint patents very difficult.

  3. Civil Engineering was not considered because the relevant publications are poorly represented in the SCI™.

  4. For further information see Abramo et al., 2011.

  5. A number of publications evidently are co-authored by more than one university/company, and by researchers from different SDSs.

  6. From Azagra-Caro (2007): “We follow Cohen and Levinthal’s (1990) definition of absorptive capacity: ‘‘a limit to the rate or quantity of scientific or technological information that a firm can absorb’’. To justify the extension of the concept of absorptive capacity from firms to regions see Niosi and Bellon (2002)”.

  7. The assumption can easily be modified to adapt the analysis to the characteristics of different SDSs, or in light of the personnel resources that universities might assign to respond to industrial demand for collaboration.

  8. This interpretation is not intended as a superficial suggestion that universities should resize their research capacity in the SDS examined. Capacity must also be planned in relation to the other two primary roles of the university: higher education and research.

  9. However, over time, there have been significant delegations of central authority to the regions (Title V of the constitution), and these are tending to increase, resulting in a current gradual development of regional federalism. For example, the regions have recently obtained the power to enact incentive measures for research in specific sectors, with appropriately targeted financing.

  10. See Abramo et al. (2008) for further information on potential distortions in aggregate bibliometric analyses that do not consider sectorial specificity.

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Acknowledgments

The authors express their sincere thanks to Flavia Di Costa, for her invaluable contribution to the data analysis. Any possible inaccuracies or other errors remain as the complete responsibility of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for System Analysis and Computer Science (IASI-CNR), National Research Council of Italy, Rome, Italy

    Giovanni Abramo

  2. Laboratory for Studies of Research and Technology Transfer, School of Engineering, Department of Management, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Rome, Italy

    Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo

  3. NEXT Ingegneria dei Sistemi S.p.A, Rome, Italy

    Marco Solazzi

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  1. Giovanni Abramo
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  2. Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo
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  3. Marco Solazzi
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Correspondence to Giovanni Abramo.

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Abramo, G., D’Angelo, C.A. & Solazzi, M. A bibliometric tool to assess the regional dimension of university–industry research collaborations. Scientometrics 91, 955–975 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0577-5

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