Increasing Faculty Research Productivity via a Triple-Helix Modeled University Outreach Project: Empirical Evidence from Thailand

This paper presents empirical evidence from Thailand on faculty research productive increased via a triple-helix modeled university outreach project. It is evidenced that faculty research productivity of Thai faculty members could be raised as these faculty staff participate in such collaborative project based on a triple-helix model of government-university-industry relations. The increased productivity is evidenced by the development of research interests of junior and senior staff, the implementation of academic research as a direct contribution to social and economic development and the emerged and sustained linkage of outreach activities participated by the government, the university and the industrial partners. Despite these findings, the paper also discusses another aspect of the findings regarding the research productivity that there is the lack of academia knowledge commercialization, which is widely recognized as desirable quality of academic research produced recently. Given the research findings, this paper therefore discusses the way in which academia taking part in the triple helix relation is able to put in economic, in addition to its academic, value to the knowledge gained.