Unraveling complexities of university-industry research interactions: The analytical power of case studies

In many advanced economies, we see increasing public policy emphasis on the utility and commercialization of publicly funded research, and growing pressure for demonstrable socioeconomic impact. Brain power, inventiveness, and creativity have become highly valued resources in contemporary ‘knowledge-based’ economies, much as raw materials were during the early times of industrialization. Responding to these sweeping developments, many research-active universities actively promote R&D cooperation with, and knowledge transfer to, the business sector. Leading research-active universities in industrial-relevant fields of science are often actively involved in contract research, consultation, and engaged in other R&D linkages with the business sector to generate funding for research. Commercializing research outputs and transferring knowledge to create science-based technologies have become an integral part of the institutional mission statement of such universities, alongside education and research. In stark contrast to the rise of commercialization policies, decision makers have to grapple with scarcity of information and statistical data on how universities perform with regards to R&D partnerships with the business sector. Administrative information is either confidential or not amenable to systematic analysis and meaningful interpretation. They also tend to be institution-specific and not easily comparable across institutions or countries. University-industry co-authored research publications (UICs) are one of the very few information sources that offer sufficient breadth and depth to conduct comparative, cross-country, and cross-university studies as well as detailed case studies of individual universities or university units ( Tijssen, 2012 ). Nowadays one can find UIC data in several world university rankings, such as the freely available web-based Leiden Ranking and in U-Multirank . Aggregate-level data on countries is used for European Commission’s Innovation Union Scoreboard and the U21 university association’s Ranking of National Higher Education Systems .