What drives the formation of ‘valuable’ university–industry linkages?: Insights from the wine industry

Most of the literature on university–industry (U–I) linkages assumes that these linkages are beneficial per se. We question this assumption, suggesting that not all such linkages are equally helpful. In this paper, we explore the factors driving the formation of ‘valuable U–I linkages’, conceived as those linkages between universities and firms that have a higher potential to diffuse knowledge to other firms in their regional economy. Our empirical strategy combines case-study methodology with econometric techniques using data from two wine clusters in Chile and in Italy. The firm's knowledge base is found to be a key driver of ‘valuable’ U–I linkages. We conclude that selectivity should be encouraged among policy makers endeavouring to promote U–I linkages.     

Technology and Academic Virtue: Student Plagiarism Through the Looking Glass

Plagiarism is the misuse of and failure to acknowledge source materials. This paper questions common responses to the apparent increase in plagiarism by students. Internet plagiarism occurs in a context – using the Internet as an information tool – where the relevant norms are far from obvious and models of virtue are difficult to identify and perhaps impossible to find. Ethical responses to the pervasiveness of Internet-enhanced plagiarism require a reorientation of perspective on both plagiarism and the Internet as a knowledge tool. Technological strategies to “catch the cheats” send a “don’t get caught” message to students and direct the limited resources of academic institutions to a battle that cannot be won. More importantly, it is not the right battleground. Rather than characterising Internet-enabled plagiarism as a problem generated and solvable by emerging technologies, we argue that there is a more urgent need to build the background conditions that enable and sustain ethical relationships and academic virtues: to nurture an intellectual community.     

Representations or people?

Most guidelines and proposalsfor Internet research ethics are based onregulations for human subjects research. In therelated research, Internet material is viewedas animate and described as people. Humanitiesresearchers have rarely been a part of thedebate about Internet research ethics and thepractices of these scholars have not been takeninto consideration when drafting most of theguidelines. This threatens to limit the kindsof Internet research that can be performed – critical strategies are particularlydiscouraged – and the ways that researchers andother users understand the Internet.Researchers who use human subjects models havenot fully acknowledged computer mediation, theconstructed aspects of Internetrepresentations, and the screen. If we viewInternet material as cultural production thenthe models for Internet research would be ArtHistory and Visual Culture, English andLiterary Studies, Film and Media Studies, Musicand Sound Studies, and Theatre and PerformanceStudies. A more complete integration of theseapproaches into Internet Studies – either as asole investigatory strategy or in tandem withother forms of inquiry – would changeresearchers' ethical questions. It would alsoshow instances in which human subjectsguidelines do not apply to complex Internetmaterial. It is imperative to demonstrate thatInternet material is not people because thisconception makes highly constructed words andimages seem natural and stereotypedrepresentations appear to be real.     

Imitation games: Turing, Menard, Van Meegeren

For many, the very idea of an artificialintelligence has always been ethicallytroublesome. The putative ability of machinesto mimic human intelligence appears to callinto question the stability of taken forgranted boundaries between subject/object,identity/similarity, free will/determinism,reality/simulation, etc. The artificiallyintelligent object thus appears to threaten thehuman subject with displacement and redundancy.This article takes as its starting point AlanTuring's famous 'imitation game,' (the socalled 'Turing Test'), here treated as aparable of the encounter between human originaland machine copy – the born and the made. Thecultural resonances of the recent on-lineperformance of a 'Turing Test' for computergenerated art are then explored. Arttraditionally taken to stand for all that isconsidered quintessentially human – andtherefore resistant to mechanisation –represents in this sense a kind of 'criticalcase' in the advance of machine intelligence.The article focuses on the moral status of thebody, human agency, and social knowledge in theongoing (re-)constructions of copy, original,and of the difference between them.     

Whether and how: Effects of international joint ventures on local innovation in an emerging economy

Business groups in emerging economies frequently use international joint ventures (IJV) as a channel for knowledge acquisition and technology advancement. While IJVs provide a business group with access to new technology, how successful a group is in exploiting that new knowledge for innovative purposes depends on the groups’ ability to recombine new knowledge with its existing pool of knowledge and resources. The more resources a group spends in forming IJVs with foreign partners, the less resources the group has in developing and sustaining organizational mechanisms that facilitate integration of existing ideas and resources. Following this theoretical duality, we view the IJV–innovation relationship not as an “either–or” question, but as a question of whether and how. Specifically, viewing business groups as networks of loosely coupled firms, we examine how intra-group network structure and evolving institutional environment moderates the IJV–patenting relationship in Taiwan between 1981 and 1998.     

Committing to vaccine R&D: a global science policy priority

The amount of vaccine R&D performed, especially that geared towards health issues affecting the developing world, is relatively modest. Despite immunisation representing the most effective tool for achieving disease eradication, and the general consensus being optimistic about the development of a vaccine capable of fighting AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis, neither private nor public entities are investing sufficiently in the field. Reasons can be associated both with a lack of market incentives as well as with the low priority that these diseases are given on Western political agendas. However, seen through a “Global Public Good” lens, it appears to be in the interest of high-income countries, and their governments in particular, to invest public resources – financial and infra-structural – in vaccine R&D for global pandemics. The paper suggests managing international cooperation through the creation of a global fund. It discusses a number of proposals put forward in the existing literature and offers a range of policy options.     

Dynamics of R&D networked relationships and mergers and acquisitions in the smart card field

This paper analyzes how the structure and the evolution of inter-firm agreements have shaped the development of the smart card industry. The aim is to establish a closer connection between the evolution of inter-firm agreements in the smart card industry and the patterns of change of technology and demand in this new high-tech industry. Based on a proprietary database covering both collaborative agreements and mergers and acquisitions (M&As) occurring in this industry over the period 1992–2006, we find that the evolution of technology and market demand shapes the dynamics of R&D networks and M&As are likely to change the industry structure. We also find that a small group of producers – first-movers – still control the industry and technological trajectories. Their position arises not for oligopolistic reasons of market structure, but for technological and organizational reasons.     

Bibliometric cartography of information retrieval research by using co-word analysis

The aim of this study is to map the intellectual structure of the field of Information Retrieval (IR) during the period of 1987–1997. Co-word analysis was employed to reveal patterns and trends in the IR field by measuring the association strengths of terms representative of relevant publications or other texts produced in IR field. Data were collected from Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) for the period of 1987–1997. In addition to the keywords added by the SCI and SSCI databases, other important keywords were extracted from titles and abstracts manually. These keywords were further standardized using vocabulary control tools. In order to trace the dynamic changes of the IR field, the whole 11-year period was further separated into two consecutive periods: 1987–1991 and 1992–1997. The results show that the IR field has some established research themes and it also changes rapidly to embrace new themes.     

Inventive and uninventive clusters: The case of Canadian biotechnology

We examine factors influencing the relative productivity of different geographic locations. Our analysis of the Canadian biotechnology industry during the 1990s reveals that inventive and uninventive locations are distinguishable within small geographic areas corresponding to roughly 7000 postal addresses. Inventive locations exhibit greater resource scale and technological focus, as well as greater emphasis on R&D investment and public and private collaboration. Comparison of inventive locations across three major metropolitan areas – Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal – indicates, however, that inventive locations vary in their emphasis on technological scale and focus relative to collaboration, and thus that location advantages can develop in distinctive ways.     

Quality-oriented technical change in Japanese wheat breeding

The article presents a productivity analysis of Japanese wheat breeding research. We first estimate a hedonic function to determine the marginal implicit values of Japanese wheat characteristics and find that protein contributes substantially to millers’ price offers to farmers. Induced innovation theory implies breeders thus should be responding to new protein-oriented price policies by developing high-protein wheat varieties. We test this hypothesis by estimating a distance function relating breeding resources – including what we call gene-recharge rates – to the yield and protein characteristics of discovered varieties. New varieties indeed have been protein-favoring and yield-disfavoring, suggesting government research programs have been market-oriented.     

How national institutions influence technology policies and firms’ knowledge-building strategies: A study of fuel cell innovation across industrialized countries

The central thesis advanced in this study is that firms’ knowledge-building strategies can be usefully explained by the variations in their national institutional contexts. Using an inductive approach, a study of fuel cell innovation across the U.S., France, Japan and Norway demonstrates how countries’ socio-political institutions – characterized by their levels of statism and corporatism – contribute to variations in technology policies pertaining to investment, collaboration, internationalization, and diversity. These technology policies are sources of advantages (and disadvantages) for firms, with implications for their knowledge-building strategies. The proposed theoretical framework is especially relevant in the context of industry emergence and R&D internationalization.     

Academics or entrepreneurs? Investigating role identity modification of university scientists involved in commercialization activity

Establishing the microfoundations of academic entrepreneurship requires closer scrutiny of a key actor contributing to this phenomenon—the university scientist. We investigate the sense-making that scientists engage in as part of their participation in technology transfer and postulate that this process involves a potential modification in their role identity. We analyzed more than 70 h of interview data at a premier U.S. public research university. We observe that scientists invoke rationales for involvement that are congruent with their academic role identity. They typically adopt a hybrid role identity that comprises a focal academic self and a secondary commercial persona. We delineate two mechanisms – delegating and buffering – that these individuals deploy to facilitate such salience in their hybrid role identity. Overall, these patterns suggest that university scientists take active steps to preserve their academic role identity even as they participate in technology transfer. Our findings clarify the social psychological processes underlying scientist involvement in commercialization activity, and offer fresh insights to the academic entrepreneurship, science policy and role identity literatures.     

The future of computer ethics: You ain't seen nothin' yet!

The computer revolution can beusefully divided into three stages, two ofwhich have already occurred: the introductionstage and the permeation stage. We have onlyrecently entered the third and most importantstage – the power stage – in which many ofthe most serious social, political, legal, andethical questions involving informationtechnology will present themselves on a largescale. The present article discusses severalreasons to believe that future developments ininformation technology will make computerethics more vibrant and more important thanever. Computer ethics is here to stay!     

The IS–business relationship and its implications for performance: An empirical study of South African and Australian organisations

Lack of a close ‘Information systems (IS)–business relationship’ has been described as a potential inhibitor to improving the contribution that information systems (IS) make to business performance. Yet the value of specific attributes of an enduring relationship between IS and business remains to be demonstrated by empirically confirming their link to IS performance. Using data collected from 167 South African and Australian companies, this study examined the effect of three relational attributes, namely commitment, mutual understanding and shared vision, on the contribution of IS to business performance. The study also examines the interrelationship amongst the relational attributes. Results revealed that a strong IS–business relationship is a significant determinant of IS performance. Organisations more successful in their use of IS are characterised by strong commitment on the part of the business to IS efforts, higher levels of IS understanding of the business, and a long-term agreement, between business and IS executives, on IS priorities. Results have important implications for organisations looking to improve the contribution of IS to organisational performance.     

Delay-dependent stochastic stability and H∞ analysis for time-delay systems with Markovian jumping parameters

This paper studies the problem of the stochastic stability and H_∞ disturbance attenuation for linear continuous-time time-delay systems that possess randomly Markovian jumping parameters. A delay-dependent sufficient condition on the stochastic stability with given H_∞ performance is proposed using the stochastic Lyapunov–Krasovskii stability theory. The conditions are formulated as a set of coupled linear matrix inequalities.