Nicolas Carayol

Objectives, agreements and matching in science–industry collaborations: reassembling the pieces of the puzzle

Abstract Science–industry collaborations have been the subject of a considerable attention in the last few years. The paper argues that, however, the existing studies are still restricted to a partial view of the phenomenon. In this respect, our study departs from the specialised literature by taking into consideration, for a given set of heterogeneous collaborations, information from both the academics’ and the firms’ side, relative to their characteristics, their aims and the collaboration settings. To do so, we constructed a database of 46 collaborations from original data we collected, in several European countries and in the US, within the SESI-TSER project. The first outcome of our study is a typology of science–industry collaborations built on a formal procedure (a multi-correspondence analysis followed by an ascendant hierarchical classification) exhibiting five coherent types of collaborations that we describe precisely. Highlighting the crucial importance of research agendas, we thus propose a simple rationale for the matching process. The latter leads us to propose an “assortative” matching hypothesis generating two polar configurations which we test and confirm. Finally, we examine the policy implications of the findings.

Individual and collective determinants of academic scientists' productivity

Abstract The paper analyses the scientific research production of more than a thousand faculty members of Louis Pasteur University, large and well ranked in Europe. We take account of individual and collective determinants to explain individual productivity in terms of intensity and quality. We find that individual variables related to the position occupied are significant. The size of the lab plays negatively on performance. The intensity and quality of colleagues’ research activities in labs are beneficial for individual research. Public contractual funding is the only type of funding which affects research intensity. Individual research production figures are significantly enhanced by the presence of foreign post-docs.

ACADEMIC INCENTIVES, RESEARCH ORGANIZATION AND PATENTING AT A LARGE FRENCH UNIVERSITY

This article presents an empirical study on the patenting activities of the faculty members of the University Louis Pasteur, a major French research university. Our findings suggest that publishing and patenting are positively related whereas academic status and patenting are not, and that university researchers are more likely to patent later in their careers. With regard to research organization, we find positive effects of the laboratorys size, of the amount of contractual funds collected by the lab and of the share these funds received from private sources.

BEHAVIORAL FOUNDATIONS AND EQUILIBRIUM NOTIONS FOR SOCIAL NETWORK FORMATION PROCESSES

This paper develops a framework for studying social network formation. Partly built upon a formalism used in theoretical economics, the network formation process we introduce is locally driven by agents who maximize a given individual payoff function. We examine two simple models and observe the limiting distributions of stochastically stable networks. We find that these networks share some of the features observed for social networks. In particular, we find critical values of the parameters for which the selected networks exhibit small world properties.

The strategic formation of inter-individual collaboration networks. Evidence from co-invention patterns

This paper contributes to an emerging literature aiming to understand the behavioral patterns that lead to the formation of social networks. We introduce a strategic model of inter-individual collaborations formation which is a variation of the Connections model. Heterogeneous agents benefit from knowledge spillovers flowing through the network and bear the costs of maintaining their direct links which increase with geographic distance. We show that this simple model generates emergent networks that share the main structural properties observed in most real social networks. Moreover, we bring the model to co-invention networks data and find that the model fits quite well the data through the various structural measures used. In particular, it provides a consistent explanation of the observed asymmetry in the distribution of neighborhood sizes and of the high concentration of connections in local areas while some distant connections are formed.

The private contractual funding of academic laboratories: a panel data analysis

The article presents new evidence explaining contractual private funding of academic laboratories. We find that public funding crowds out private funding. While private funding increases with publications it decreases with publications corrected for impact.

Efficiency of Network Structures: The Needle in the Haystack

The modelling of networks formation has recently became the object of an increasing interest in economics. One of the important issues raised in this literature is the one of networks efficiency. Nevertheless, for non trivial payoff functions, searching for efficient network structures turns out to be a very difficult analytical problem as well as a huge computational task, even for a relatively small number of agents. In this paper, we explore the possibility of using genetic algorithms (GA) techniques for identifying efficient network structures, because the GA have proved their power as a tool for solving complex optimization problems. The robustness of this method in predicting optimal network structures is tested on two simple stylized models introduced by Jackson and Wolinski (1996), for which the efficient networks are known over the whole state space of parameter values.

Reference classes: a tool for benchmarking universities’ research

Based on new comparison principles that take into account both the volume of scientific production and its impact, this paper proposes a method for defining reference classes of universities. Several tools are developed in order to enable university managers to define the value system according to which their university shall be compared to others. We apply this methodology to French universities and illustrate it using the reference classes of the best ranked universities according to several value systems.