UNU-MERIT Working Papers Series
The impact of the regional environment on the knowledge transfer outcomes of public research organisations: preliminary results for Europe
Nordine Es-Sadki & Anthony Arundel #2015-017We use survey data for 238 European universities and 24 research
institutes to examine the effects of regional factors at the NUTS-1 or
NUTS-2 level on three knowledge transfer outcomes of public research
organisations: the number of licence agreements, start-ups and R&D
agreements with companies. We find that (1) a larger share of regional
employment in high and medium-high technology manufacturing sectors in
the same region as the public research organisation has a positive
impact on the number of licence agreements. (2) A larger share of
employment in knowledge-intensive services has a positive impact on the
number of start-ups and research agreements, but a negative impact on
licence agreements. (3) Competition as measured by the number of public
research organisations in a region has a negative impact on all three
outcomes.
This paper draws on 2012-2013 survey data from ASTP-PROTON and from a
Knowledge Transfer survey conducted for the Norwegian Ministry of
Education and Research, Kommersialiserring av offentlig finansiert
forskning - datainnsamling, systematisering og analyse for
Forskningsbarometeret, under sub-contract for DAMVAD. Their support is
gratefully acknowledged.
Keywords: University-industry technology transfer, technology transfer
offices, regional location
JEL Classification: I23, O32, M13, L24
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