Aldo Geuna

PROXIMITY AND THE USE OF PUBLIC SCIENCE BY INNOVATIVE EUROPEAN FIRMS

We use the results of the policies, appropriation and competitiveness in Europe (PACE) 1993 survey of Europes largest firms to explore the effect of proximity on knowledge flows from affiliated firms, suppliers, customers, joint ventures, competitors and public research organisations to innovative firms. The focus is on the last. First, we find that public science is among the most important sources of technical knowledge for the innovative activities of Europes largest industrial firms. Then, after comparing the PACE results with the Community Innovation Survey II (1997) and the Carnegie Mellon Survey (1994), we use the unique information from the PACE survey on the geographic location of knowledge sources and the methods used to access them to develop an econometric analysis of proximity and location. The importance of proximity for sourcing knowledge from public research increases with the quality and output of domestic public research organisations and the importance given to public science by the respondents. It declines with an increase in the firms R&D expenditure, activity in the North American market and the importance to the firm of codified basic research results. Surprisingly, firms that find informal contacts to be an important method for acquiring public research results are more likely to find proximity less important, even though proximity allows firms to access tacit knowledge. This effect is primarily limited to European countries, suggesting the development of a ‘European Research Area’.

The changing rationale for European university research funding: are there negative unintended consequences?

In recent years there has been wide-ranging debate on the advantages and drawbacks of the rationale for resource allocation to university research. The post-World War II rationale for public support of science has been challenged by a more contractual-oriented vision of how to support research. The academic debate has provided a diverse set of descriptions and explanations with some views strongly supporting the contractual-oriented rationale and others critical of it.1 The debate transcends the academic circle, as illustrated by the large number of national government reports: for example, Commission Jacques Attali (1998) for France, House Committee on Science (1998) for the United States, and National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (1997) for the United Kingdom.2 This article examines how changes in the rationale for science funding might influence the behavior of universities in European Union (EU) countries and the USA.3 The article begins by describing the changes in university research funding for a selected group of EU countries during the period 1981-1996 and goes on to analyze the contractual-oriented vision of university research funding and its consequences. The primary focus is on the negative unintended consequences of the new rationale. It is shown that the short-term efficiency gains resulting from the quasi-market incentive

Science and Innovation: Rethinking the Rationales for Funding and Governance

The evolving research policy environment new actor relationships models of research funding.

The Impact of Academic Patenting on University Research and Its Transfer

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the impact of academic patenting. On the basis of CV information and two separate surveys, we provide the first empirical evidence for a sample of UK academics in physics, chemistry, computer science and a subset of engineering. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. First, our econometric results suggest that academic patenting is complementary to publishing at least up to a certain level of patenting output after which we found some evidence of a substitution effect. Second, our analysis of the potential impact of patenting on the other channels of knowledge transfers seems to indicate that patenting does not have a negative impact on the other channels of knowledge exchange. We have found some positive correlation between the stock of patents and other channels of knowledge transfer, however, also in this case, we have found that a substitution effect sets in indicating a inverted U shape type of relationships between patenting and other knowledge transfer channels.

University Patenting and its Effects on Academic Research

The paper explores the possible consequences for academic research of increased patenting in European universities. It underlines that most of the policy literature refers to the advantages of university patenting without balancing them against the costs or the risks involved in the activities. We provide a brief description of university patenting activity in Europe examining both university-owned patents and university-invented patents. The review of the literature reveals that unlike the United States, little is known in Europe about the changes taking place in public research as a result of increased patenting and increased institutionalisation of patents. We discuss possible analytical approaches to identify both short-term and long-term effects. Concluding remarks addressing the key issues for future empirical assessments are presented in the last section.

Information and communication technologies and the production, distribution and use of knowledge

The interaction between the development of information and communication technologies and the evolution of the organisation of the generation of new knowledge is twofold. Information and communication technologies change the process and the organisation of the accumulation of new knowledge. The new conditions for the accumulation of technological knowledge and the elaboration of an appropriate institutional and organisational set-up in turn do affect the pace and direction of the technological convergence upon which the evolution of information and communication technologies rests.

The knowledge bases of the world’s largest pharmaceutical groups: what do patent citations to non-patent literature reveal?

This article examines the knowledge bases of the world’s largest pharmaceutical groups by sales. It builds upon the concepts of knowledge specialisation and knowledge integration as the relevant dimensions along which knowledge bases can be mapped. The former is studied developing indicators of breadth. Breadth is measured by analysing the evolution of specialisation by scientific field over time. It hints at the widening range of bodies of scientific and technological knowledge relevant to firms’ innovative activities. Knowledge integration is studied developing indicators of depth. Depth is measured by analysing the evolution of integration across different typologies of research. It hints at the complex, non-linear interdependencies that link the scientific and technological domains. We develop the analysis on the strength of an original database of 33,127 European Patent Office patents and 41,931 citations to ‘non-patent document’ (of which 19,494 were identified as scientific articles included in the ISI databases) of the 30 largest pharmaceuticals groups during the period 1990–1997. The groups studied seem to have incrementally increased the breadth of their knowledge bases, moving towards the fields proper to the new biopharmaceutical research trajectory. At the same time, some of the groups studied exhibit remarkable depth in knowledge integration in particular fields such as biotechnology, biochemical research and neurosciences.

University IPRs and knowledge transfer: is university ownership more efficient?

This paper addresses an issue that has been largely ignored so far in the empirical literature on the role of patents in university–industry knowledge transfer: does it matter who owns the patents on university research? We observe that especially in Europe, many patents in which university researchers are listed as inventors are not owned by the university. From a literature review, we conclude that private ownership of university patents may reduce the efficiency of the knowledge transfer process. This hypothesis is put to an empirical test, using data on patents in six European countries. Specifically, we assess whether university-owned patents (in Europe) are more often applied, and/or more economically valuable, than university-invented (but not-owned) patents. Our results indicate that, after correcting for observable patent characteristics, there are only very small differences between university-owned and university-invented patents in terms of their rate of commercialization or economic value.

Science and Innovation

This book re-examines the rationale for public policy, concluding that the prevailing ‘public knowledge’ model is evolving towards a networked or distributed model of knowledge production and use in which public and private institutions play complementary roles. It provides a set of tools and models to assess the impact of the new network model of funding and governance, and argues that governments need to adapt their funding and administrative priorities and procedures to support the emergence and healthy growth of research networks. The book goes on to explain that interdependencies and complementarities in the production and distribution of knowledge require a new and more contextual, flexible and complex approach to government funding, monitoring and assessment.

PUBLISHING AND PATENTING IN US AND EUROPEAN UNIVERSITIES

The rise of the ‘knowledge-based economy’ has raised the visibility among policy-makers, scholars, and industrial managers of the economic institutions that create and disseminate knowledge. Prominent among these institutions is the research university, and many industrial and industrializing economies now look to universities as important sources of industry relevant knowledge and innovations, as well as scientists and engineers. At the same time, increased financial pressures on many universities in the United States, Europe, and Japan have led administrators and faculty to seek new sources of financial support, including research support and patent licensing revenues from industry. Although universities have long played an important role in the creation and transfer of knowledge and innovations to industry, this renewed focus on their economic role has in many cases (and for obscure reasons) emphasized university patenting as the primary channel of university–industry technology and knowledge transfer. Public policy initiatives and revision of university policies throughout the industrial economies have sought to facilitate patenting and licensing of university research advances. These changes have sparked a renewed interest in the economics of science (David and Dasgupta, 1994; Stephan, 1996) and have contributed to the growth of a heterogeneous body of literature that aims to understand the economic behavior of universities, firms, and ‘transfer organizations’ that span the university–industry boundary in the production and distribution of knowledge (Mowery et al., 2004). In recent years, a number of studies have examined various aspects of academic Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs). 1 Data constraints have confined most of these studies to the United States. Most studies of European university–industry relationships have limited themselves to the perspective of industrial firms seeking to ‘tap into’ university research, and only a few studies of the European context have examined university–industry relationships from the perspective of the university (Geuna, 1999 is an exception). Yet, the contrasting historical evolution of the modern university systems of the United States and the nations of Europe means