Barbara Heller-Schuh

Participations to European Framework Programs of higher education institutions and their association with organizational characteristics

This paper aims to analyze patterns of participation of higher education institutions (HEIs) to European Framework Programs (EU-FP) and their association with HEI characteristics, country and geographical effects. We have analyzed a sample of 2235 HEIs in 30 countries in Europe, derived from the European Tertiary Education Register (ETER), which has been matched with data on participations in EU-FPs in 2011 using the EUPRO database. Our findings identified (1) a high concentration of EU-FP participation in a small group of HEIs with high reputation; (2) the participation of non-doctorate awarding HEIs in EU-FPs is very limited despite the fact that they account for a significant share of tertiary student enrolments; (3) the number of participations tends to increase proportionally to organizational size, and is strongly influenced by international reputation; (5) there is limited evidence of significant country effects in EU-FP participations, as well as of the impact of distance from Brussels. We interpret these results as an outcome of the close association between HEI reputation and the network structure of EU-FP participants.

ServPPINs as instruments for realizing system innovations: two case studies in passenger transport in Austria

This book is devoted to the study of public–private innovation networks in services (ServPPINs). These are a new type of innovation network which have rapidly developed in service economies. ServPPINs are collaborations between public and private service organisations, their objective being the development of new and improved services which encompass both technological and non-technological innovations.

Ranking Lists and European Framework Programmes

The operational context for higher education institutions has become increasingly competitive: universities have to compete on national and international markets for students, staff, funding and prestige. The emergence of various markets, market mechanisms and competition in higher education have become a well-established and much discussed fact, and have shaped the dynamics of the higher education arena (Enders & Jongbloed 2007; Texeira et al. 2004) In a global competition of knowledge societies, higher education institutions have been vested with the task of economic and social change, and are expected to contribute to the competitiveness of nationstates as well as their local communities.

The Embeddedness of Regions in R&D Collaboration Networks of the EU Framework Programmes

This article focuses on the embeddedness of European regions in networks of R&D collaborations of the EU Framework Programmes. Network embeddedness is defined in terms of network analytic centrality measures calculated for organisations and aggregated to the regional level. The objective is to estimate how region-internal and region-external characteristics affect a region’s positioning in the thematic networks of Information and Communication Technologies, Sustainable Development and Life Sciences. In our modelling approach, we employ panel spatial Durbin error models, linking a region’s centrality in the network to knowledge production and general economic characteristics of regions, and their neighbours, respectively. We found evidence that financial R&D resources, human capital and the level of socio-economic development are important general determinants of a region’s network positioning. By linking European R&D networks with regional innovativeness, the study provides important implications for setting priorities in a regional innovation policy context.

Structural Involvement and Financial Success in the European Framework Programme: The Case of Austria

The European Framework Programmes (EU-FPs) are a key policy instrument of the European Union for improving the competitiveness of European science and industry. In place since the 1980s, they have added a substantial amount of money to research, technology, and innovation (RTI) funding all over Europe. As such they have offered incentives for trans-national RTI cooperation in terms of ambitious and typically strategic projects, both for organizations as well as regions and Member States. The focus of this study is on the Austrian participation on the level of thematic areas under the COOPERATION programme in FP7. Our objective is to relate Austria’s financial success in these areas to various input-oriented measures, and to contribute to the discussion of complementarity of national and EU policy measures in the field of RTI. We develop a new indicator, namely the structural involvement of a member state into thematic networks in the EU-FP, and employ methods from social network analysis to examine the importance of close linkages to European collaboration networks as compared to classical indicators, like the number of project participations, project coordinations, success rates or the availability of funds. By this, the study departs from existing work by pointing to further valuable indicators for the evaluation of the involvement of countries in EU-FP networks. From the findings, we conclude that structural involvement in EU-FP networks is a necessary condition for leveraging complementary funds on the EU-level. Thus, the study produces some promising results for policy development on the national level, especially regarding involvement in Joint Technology Initiatives and new approaches like the Joint Programming Initiative.