Seminar by Professor Koen Frenken

Proximity, collaboration and Mode 2 knowledge production: The case of non-pharmaceutical diabetes 2 research in Europe

Koen Frenken[1] and Anne ter Wal[2]

[1] Eindhoven Centre for Innovation Studies (ECIS), Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands [2] Imperial College Business school, London, United Kingdom

Abstract:
We analyse research collaborations as measured by co-publications in the field of non-pharmaceutical diabetes 2, for Europe as a whole and for individual countries separately. We are interested in the determinants of research collaboration with particular interest in public-private partnerships between university, hospital, industry and government. We explain the interaction intensity between any two research organizations by their proximity in five dimensions: cognitive, organizational, social, institutional, and geographical. Statistical analysis on the pan-European collaboration network shows that social proximity is the most important determinant of collaboration, where social proximity refers to the extent to which two organizations have collaborated in the past. Repeating the analysis for individual European countries, we show that the determinants of research collaboration differ widely among countries. In particular, we find that institutional proximity, indicating the extent to which partners come from the same institutional sphere (university, hospital, industry, government) plays a significant role only in Italy, Greece, Spain and Switzerland, which indicates that in these countries triple helix interactions (including public-private partnerships) are less well developed than in other European countries.