دانشگاه های علوم مرتبط صنعتی : به سوی مدل های اندازه گیری و شاخص های گرایش کارآفرینی

Which university departments engaged in industrially relevant science are likely candidates to become entrepreneurial? At present, there are neither measurement models nor leading indicators that can answer such questions at an international comparative level. This paper introduces concepts, theory, and a measurement model for identifying (the early stages of) a university's enterpreneurial orientation within a quantitative analytical framework. This approach focuses specifically on university–industry interactions, in which the connectivity between academic science and industrial research is captured and measured empirically in terms of (1) public–private co-authored research articles, and (2) references (‘citations’) within corporate research articles to university research articles. The paper examines a range of country-level and institutional determinants of industrially relevant science, across 18 research areas of significant industrial interest, and at two different levels of analysis: research systems of OECD countries, and large sets of research universities within those countries. The results of these large-scale analyses, along with those of a case study dealing with European universities active in the field of immunology research, suggest that many structural factors determine university–industry interactions and (the potential for) entrepreneurial orientation. The two connectivity indicators appear to be of minor significance compared to a university's country of location and the magnitude of its research activities in industrially relevant fields of science.

This paper introduces a novel conceptual and analytical framework to conduct comprehensive and in-depth analyses of university's ‘industrially relevant research’ (IRR) in relation to the science-based entrepreneurial orientation (SEO) of university units. The scope of this paper is restricted to research-related activities, outcomes and impacts (thus excluding teaching, training, and consultancy activities with a commercial value). The earliest stages of SEO can be examined by looking at structural characteristics and abstract functions related to academic research activities, which are operationalised in terms of their research output, and their linkages and interactions with private-sector users of their research-based knowledge. The approach taken in this study focuses specifically on quantifiable information related to the production of codified research-based knowledge and its dissemination to science-dependent industrial R&D.1 The phenomenon of entrepreneurial universities has now become widespread within the advanced industrialised countries as well as developing countries, and has attracted increasing policy attention. So far, most of the policy debate and empirical analysis focused on economic outputs and impacts of entrepreneurial universities (such as patents, licenses and start-up firms), or their technology transfer mechanisms and facilities. The pervasive diffusion of this entrepreneurial orientation justifies larger-scale and more in-depth empirical studies focusing on enterpreneurial potential. The analytical framework introduced in this paper enables a systematic investigation of early ‘upstream’ knowledge-generating stages of entrepreneurial science and university/industry interactions, both within and across and fields of science, as well as across countries. The remainder of paper is organised as follows: Section 2 presents a brief review of theoretical concepts, empirical studies and policy issues related to entrepreneurial science that may guide the development of an indicator-based comparative framework. Section 3 introduces the two key indicators of IRR, and describes the methodology and data sets that are applied in the statistical analyses. Section 4 presents the results of the analyses dealing with the aggregate levels of countries and research fields. In addition, the statistical relationships between IRR indicators and university-owned patents are investigated for a sample of European universities active within the field of immunology research. Finally, Section 5 summarises the main findings, observations and interpretations leading to tentative conclusions as to the limitations and relevance of this new approach.

The underlying notion and guiding principle of this study is the process view of a research university, i.e. a university that is becoming more entrepreneurial through time, during which it will engage in university–industry research cooperation and contract research. Some features of the process towards university entrepreneurial science, and possibly also the potential for academic entrepreneurship, are amenable to comparative measurement and can be captured by the two connectivity indicators introduced in this study: the research cooperation intensity (RCI) and the corporate citation intensity (CCI). The results indicate that both indicators are, at best, partial proxies of a university's entrepreneurial orientation. The industrial relevance of academic science, and the associated entrepreneurial potential of universities, is more likely to be affected by the country of location and the sheer magnitude of a university's research activities. Although they are still rather speculative indicators in need of further validation, CCI and RCI have nonetheless proven to be of significant instrumental relevance for investigating the structural characteristics of university–industry interactions, especially at the macro-level. Even so, it is important to keep in mind that the tentative conclusions drawn from these observations are valid only within the context of the analytical framework applied in this study, one that relies heavily on a conceptualisation of SEO in terms of university–industry interactions and connections, and hinging critically on comparative information derived from research articles in international scientific literature, patents, and citation flows. The scope of inference is therefore restricted to those fields of academic science and those research-based industries that produce significant numbers of research papers and patents. In many cases universities simply produce too few patents to warrant any definitive conclusions, irrespective of the field of science. Owing to the rather narrow analytical focus adopted in this approach, one may easily overlook or neglect the possible contributions of education and training, transfer activities, and other research-related activities that may ultimately prove to be more important drivers and effective channels for universities to generate (complementary) economic returns. Given the fact that a host of country-, field- and organisation-specific factors are likely to impact on different phases of these processes, it is unreasonable to assume that this daunting complexity can be easily reduced to a single convincing measurement model that may give rise to reliable leading indicators. This inherent constraint is exacerbated by the dynamics of modern-day science and its manifold interactions with economic development; the world of university entrepreneurial science will have moved on, and may have altered significantly, before a plausible general theory, comprehensive models, and appropriate indicators have been developed.