PROKNOW - Production of Knowledge Revisited
The Impact of Academic Spin-Offs on Public Research Performance in Europe
The project analyses the positive and negative impact of spin-off firms on public research institutions. Cirus is responsible for the Swiss case in a comparative study of seven European countries.
Projectpartners
- Social Science Research Center in Berlin (Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung) (Coordinator)
- OFCE-DRIC, Nice-Sophia-Antipolis, France
- SPRU, University of Sussex, UK
- VTT, Espoo, Finland
- CHEPS, University of Twente, Netherlands
- Institute of Sociology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria
The project is funded within the EU's sixth framework programme, PRIORITY 7: Citizens and Governance in a knowledge based society.
Duration
03/2006 – 2/2009
Responsible at CIRUS
Background
The production of scientific knowledge counts as a key economic resource of
the modern knowledge-based European society. However, there are still relatively
little empirical findings about the supposed interactions and interdependencies
between different, public and private, actors in the innovation process. Also,
the consequences of more interactive forms of innovation for public research
systems have not been adequately reflected. Spin-offs may be regarded as an
element in this larger transformation process of knowledge production and are
thus an exemplary topic to study innovation processes in the interaction of
science, economy and society.
While acknowledging the general importance of
scientific knowledge for innovation processes, science policy still struggles
with the problem how to improve the transfer processes at the interface of
science-industry relations. How can the production of socially and economically
relevant knowledge in academic research institutions be accelerated, and the
quality of the knowledge production improved, without restricting the relatively
autonomous governance structures of the public research system? Commercial
spin-off-activities by university and extra-university research institutions are
highly interesting phenomena, because in these cases public research
institutions leave their own reference system in order to submit the results of
their endeavors to the commercial logic of profitability.
The PROKNOW Project
While research has been mainly concerned with the conditions for fostering
spin-offs, PROKNOW shifts the focus back to the multiple impacts and
consequences of entrepreneurial activities – positive as well as negative – for
academic institutions. The actual effects of spin-offs on the orientation,
positioning, and capacities of public research institutions are hardly known.
On the side of positive effects, the project analyses to what extent
spin-offs contribute to enlarging the capacities and sharpening the profile of
public institutions, thus increasing their competitiveness on the academic
market. The extension of the “value chain of knowledge” towards concrete
opportunities of application may enable valuable feedback processes for the
academic system of knowledge production. To reflect the product quality of
research results can enlarge the scope of a scientific project. The pure
existence of spin-offs as new distribution channels might feed back on the
conception of research questions and project designs.
On the side of
negative effects, the main question is to what extent spin-offs harm public
institutions by privatizing research and thus extracting competences and
capacities from universities and extra-university research institutions. Intense
interaction with private partners can lead to risks for academic institutions.
Changing the reference system can negatively affect everyday research practices.
A quick entrepreneurial success of spin-offs for example bears the danger of a
“pull effect” and of a loss of scientific competences from the public to the
private side if there is no strong “knowledge retention”. Researchers can be
attracted by entrepreneurial opportunities and subordinate their activities to a
short-sighted economic commercialization logic.
The project consists of the following steps:
- The partners will identify successful fields of academic spin-offs and the
corresponding public research institutions.
- The interactions between spin-offs and public research institutions will be
identified and assessed.
- The profile of research, teaching and transfer activities of the public
research institutions will be analyzed.
- Then, the spin-off-interactions of public research institutions will be
compared with their general activity profile and the relevance of
spin-off-activities and -interactions for the activity profile and performance
of public research institutions are analysed and appraised.
- Finally, a typology of parent organizations, a system of indicators to assess and measure the influence of spin-off-cooperation and science policy recommendations on the national as well as the EU level are developed.
For further information
please consult http://www.wzb.eu/default.en.asp.