Fostering industry-science cooperation through public funding: differences between universities and public research centres

This paper analyses behavioural additionality of subsidies by regional and EU framework programme public funding granted to business enterprises in terms of the ??instalment?? of research cooperation between industry and science. Acknowledging their specificities in terms of research orientation, research scale, and management of research, the science component is divided in universities and public research centres. Drawing on firm level data provided by the OECD bi-annual business R&D surveys of 2004 and 2006 for Belgium, the main result is that funding by regional governments fosters the instalment of industry-science research cooperation. However, this positive effect is limited to the case of cooperation with public research centres (and not with universities). The prerequisite of commercialisation of research in the case of funding by regional governments could explain this. Public funding provided by the EU framework programme did not exert an impact on the instalment of industry-science cooperation, neither with universities nor with public research centres. This could be due the fact that EU funding is targeted at firms that are already cooperating and does not favour the set-up of new cooperation.     

Managing competition between individual and organizational goals in cross-sector research and development centres

Research of potential socio-economic value is commonly conducted within cross-sector (government, university, business) centres. Success depends on partners whose objectives and strategies may converge or compete. Yet little empirical evidence exists on: (a) how individual researchers perceive the benefits of their participation, (b) how far the structures and functions of particular collaborative R&D centres coalesce around of researchers’ expectations and, (c) what problems arise for researchers who opt for a ‘second job’ in the centre. The paper presents a qualitative analysis of a survey of respondents from public sector organizations involved in Australian Cooperative Research Centres. A novel frame for analysing these data is the study of inter-organizational relationships (IOR). We use the perspective of the individual research scientists to illuminate the important management issues of trust, governance, and competition between functional domains, which emerge from IOR and which have been inadequately recognised in the context of collaborative R&D centres. The findings have implications for the management and of the centres, for the careers of research scientists and for public policy.     

Ambidexterity,external knowledge and performance in knowledge-intensive firms

The paper investigates the relationship between organizational ambidexterity and firm performance in knowledge-intensive firms. In particular, using a quantitative methodology involving a structural equation model, the research investigates whether external knowledge sourcing enhances the impact of ambidexterity on firm performance. The results show that organizational ambidexterity in knowledge-intensive firms does not, in fact, have a significant impact on firm performance, but it does have a positive and significant mediating effect considering external knowledge sourcing. The findings are presented along with interesting and significant implications for both theory and practice, largely stemming from the still much neglected relationship between organizational ambidexterity and external knowledge sourcing in the open innovation context.     

The influence of public programs on inter-firm R&D collaboration strategies: project-level evidence from EU FP5 and FP6

Inter-firms R&D collaborations are often seen as an effective mean to access new resources, to innovate and/or to enter new markets in a turbulent environment characterized by fierce competition. However, all R&D partnerships do not have the same strategic importance. We analyze the strategic features of two types of partnerships that are seldom compared in the academic literature on R&D alliances: EU-sponsored inter-firms collaborations on the one hand, and non-sponsored, spontaneous inter-firm collaborations on the other. We compare their incentives and coordination mechanisms, and derive theoretical propositions that we test empirically. Our econometric analysis uses original data on (sponsored and non-sponsored) projects conducted by participants in the 5th and 6th European R&D Framework Programs. Our empirical findings support our main propositions. EU-funded collaborations are more exploratory and more focused on peripheral competences than spontaneous R&D collaborations. They are also less flexible, due to rigid monitoring rules which are nevertheless crucial to the projects?? success. However, there is no major difference between the different types of EU-sponsored collaborations, which pleads for a simplification of these policy instruments.     

Part-time employment: a comparative analysis of Spain and the Netherlands

Most industrialized countries have seen part-time employment as a percentage of total employment increasing in the last decade. This paper presents the results of a comparative study of part-time employment in Spain and the Netherlands. The project comprises a legal comparative study of the effectiveness of the normative solutions provided by the Dutch and Spanish legal orders regarding the protection of part-time workers and the promotion of part-time employment, with special attention paid to the gender dimension of part-time work in both countries; and an analysis, based on data extracted from the European Community Household Panel (1995–2001), of the determinants of part-time employment in both countries and an examination of the extent to which part-time jobs are used as stepping-stones to full-time positions. We have found significant country differences regarding females’ decisions to take part-time jobs. We also have found that, in general, Dutch females are not less likely than their male counterparts to increase the number of hours they work. However, this applies only to those females who are part of a couple or have children younger than 12 years. In Spain, females are 2.6 times less likely than their male counterparts to switch from a part-time to a full-time job.     

Determinants and public policy implications of academic-industry knowledge transfer in life sciences: a review and a conceptual framework

There is a considerable interest of scholars in benefits and challenges arising from involvement of academic researchers and their institutions in knowledge transfer activities with the business sector. The emerging questions have resulted in a number of studies, yielding rich but mixed findings. The purpose of this paper is to systematically review this body of investigative work, with a particular emphasis on life sciences. Based on the systematic analysis and synthesis of 135 articles published between 1980 and 2014, we discuss the most interesting findings for each of the six identified principal academic-industry research topics: involvement predictors and motivators, role of incentives, institutional performance determinants, knowledge transfer institutionalization, relationship with scientific output and impact on open science. Whereas many studies reach consensus regarding the particular personal and contextual predictors of researchers’ knowledge transfer involvement, we also find substantial evidence that depending on empirical setting, variables such as scientific productivity and institutional technology transfer support policies can act both as enablers and inhibitors in the process. We find no straightforward evidence regarding the role of the size, age and structure of technology transfer offices in the knowledge transfer performance of academic institutions. We also show that most studies agree that engagement in knowledge transfer activities does not negatively affect the researchers’ scientific output. Yet, it is less clear to what extent university-industry interactions can be detrimental for the norms of open science. We draw several policy implications for academic settings and emphasize interesting avenues for further research in this field.     

Spatial and industry proximity in collaborative research: evidence from Italian manufacturing firms

This paper attempts to check the existence of geographic and industry distance effects, alongside other microeconomic determinants, on firms’ decisions to engage in R&D collaboration. Physical distance is defined by geographical coordinates while the measure of industry distance is based on the trade intensity between sectors. The model specified here refers to the combined spatial autoregressive model with autoregressive disturbances and it is estimated through the spatial two stage least square procedure. The results show that both geographical and industry proximity, positively affect the decision to cooperate in R&D.     

Women in government, public corruption, and liberal democracy: a panel analysis

Ever since a 2001 World Bank report, many policymakers have come to accept a gender-based approach to corruption control, which posits that women in government reduce corruption because females are more ethical than males. An alternative explanation asserting the spuriousness of the gender-corruption link suggests that both gender equality and lower corruption result from a functioning liberal democracy. In this study, eight hypotheses are formulated and tested with longitudinal data for 204 countries. Findings demonstrate that neither the level of women in government nor a change in it has any impact on the prevalence and/or short-term trend of corruption. But both the strength of liberal institutions and an increase in this strength predict the prevalence and trend of corruption.     

Reconsidering risk: adapting public policies to intergenerational determinants and biosocial interactions in health-related needs

According to recent research, interactions between infant health and environment can play crucial roles in clustering health and economic disadvantage among certain families. Researchers have provided a clear example of such intergenerational biosocial cycles when they document that interactions between parental low birth weight status and prenatal environment are associated with the risk of a low birth weight, and that interactions between a child's birth weight status and early childhood environment are associated with adult socioeconomic outcomes. In this article, we consider how existing policies may be revised to more effectively address such interactions between social and biological risk categories. We are particularly concerned in this discussion with revising risk categories so they can encompass biological risk, social risk, and developmental frameworks. A framework of biosocial risk is quite flexible and may be applied to a variety of issues and programs; however, in this article we focus on the single case of low birth weight to illustrate our argument. In considering specific applications, we further explore how attention to biosocial interactions may reshape Medicaid, special education, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.     

Towards systematic knowledge building: An anti-crime research and development continuum

This response argues that the National Research Council (NRC) report, while valuable and thorough, would have benefited from conceptualizing evaluation activities along a continuum of knowledge development, with evaluations initially verifying the effectiveness of program concepts, before moving to evaluations of the feasibility and generalizability of anti-crime strategies and, finally, to evaluations of the costs and benefits of implementation of new strategies.

The judicial review of legislation in the United Kingdom: a public choice analysis

The Human Rights Act 1998 unprecedentedly enabled the senior courts in the United Kingdom to review parliamentary enactments for compatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights. This article seeks to analyze within the framework of public choice economics two phenomena arising from this development that are counterintuitive: What made Parliament voluntarily invite the judiciary to monitor its acts? Why has Parliament consistently complied with rulings of the Judicial House of Lords that challenged primary legislation over the last 10 years? It argues that the Act was designed in a way that fulfilled the electoral commitments of the enacting majority by supplying promised policies to its constituencies, while minimizing agency costs and information problems in favor of Parliament’s corporate interests. Significantly, the Act left intact the veto powers of Parliament and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. As such, it disincentivized the Judicial House of Lords to risk costly overturns of its rulings by Parliament for straying too far from the range of the ideal policy positions spanned by Parliament and Strasbourg. Drawing from the empirical evidence of the past decade, it will be shown that in nearly all cases the Law Lords have either upheld the compatibility of challenged statutes, reaffirmed parliamentary preferences, or followed the jurisprudence of the Strasbourg Court.     

Mapping research on strategic alliances and innovation: a co-citation analysis

Using co-citation analysis, the present study attempts to rationalize and organize the combined alliance and innovation literature in order to determine its intellectual structure (i.e. its shared attributes such as models, theories, methods, findings, and implications), as well as to gain a deeper understanding of the most important research trends. More specifically, our goals are: (1) to delineate the intellectual structure of research on alliance and innovation, as represented in the academic literature; (2) to determine the subfields that constitute the intellectual structure and the relationships, if any, between these subfields; (3) to identify contributions that play a pivotal role in bridging two or more conceptual domains of research; and finally, (4) to map the intellectual structure in a two-dimensional space in order to visualize spatial distances between intellectual themes. Implications for future studies are then drawn.     

Citation analysis of randomized experiments in criminology and criminal justice: a research note

In recent years multiple studies have used citation analysis as a way to examine the most cited scholars and works in criminology and criminal justice and its subfields. This study is the first to focus on the most cited randomized experiments in criminological research. Using citation counts from both Social Science Citation Index and Google Scholar, and multiple sources of randomized experiments, I present the most cited experiments in six areas: policing, courts, corrections, schools, community, and early prevention. Experiments published in non-criminological (e.g., medical) journals tend to be the most cited, and early prevention research is generally cited most frequently of the six categories. I conclude by considering possible reasons why certain experiments are more cited than others.