Theme paper Triple Helix I (January
1995)
The Triple Helix---University-Industry-Government Relations:
A Laboratory for Knowledge Based Economic Development
Henry Etzkowitz, Sociology, State
University of New York at Purchase and Science Policy Institute (SPI) SUNY
Stony Brook
Loet Leydesdorff, Science &
Technology Dynamics, University of Amsterdam
Universities and industry, up to
now relatively separate and distinct institutional spheres, are assuming tasks
that were formerly largely the province of the other. The role of government in relation to these two spheres is
changing in apparently contradictory directions. Governments are offerring incentives, on the one hand, and
pressing academic institutions, on the other, to go beyond performing the
traditional functions of cultural memory, education and research, and make a
more direct contribution to "wealth creation" (HMSO 1993). Governments are also shifting their
relationships to economic institutions, becoming both more and less
involved. In some countries with a
laissez faire capitalist tradition such as the U.S. government is playing a
greater role in innovation in the civilian economy (Etzkowitz 1994a) while in
former socialist societies government has withdrawn from its previous position
of total control of science and technology policy; adopting a stance more in
accord with laissez faire principles.
Multi-national institutions such as the European Union, the World Bank
and the U.N. are also moving to embrace concepts of knowledge based economic
development that bring the knowledge, productive and regulatory spheres of
society into new configurations. In this
conference, we wish to study the role of the sciences in this changing
environment with a focus on the university's position in the newly emerging
knowledge infrastructure.
The university,
the sciences and the new economic environment
The modern university, which
combines teaching and research, emerged in the early 19th century. Historically, the institution went through a
revolutionary transition in the late 19th century; from being largely a
higher-education institute, the universities increasingly came to have social
functions in both research and teaching.
With hindsight, this differentiation of functions can be understood in
terms of changes in the knowledge infrastructure. The emergence of the industrial research laboratory and the
scientification of industrial production had created a labour market for
experimentally trained academicians (Noble 1977; Van den Belt & Rip
1987). Universities offered a specific
place for integration and differentiation among functions in the knowledge
infrastructure like scholarly learning, theorizing, and experimental practices.
The first half of the 20th
century has sometimes been characterized in terms of the extension of this
higher-education system under the patronage of the nation states (e.g., Parsons
& Platt 1975). During much of the
latter half of the century, the expansion served to accomplish these purposes
on a larger scale, with expectations of long-term practical relevance (Bush
1945). Increased international economic
competition, the end of the Cold-War and the emergence of new models of knowledge
based economic devleopment have called this taken for granted "ivory
tower" role of the university into question.
A new social contract between the
university and the larger society is being negotiated in much more specific
terms than the old one (Etzkowitz 1994b).
The former contract was based on a linear model of innovation, presuming
only long term contributions of academic knowledge to the economy. Now both long and short term contributions
are seen to be possible, based on examples of firm formation and research
contracts in fields such as biotechnology and computer science. A spiral model of innovation is required to
capture multiple reciprocal linkages at different stages of the capitalization
of knowledge (Etzkowitz 1994c; Leydesdorff 1994). What dynamics are involved; how are industrial and R&D
policies affected? Should government
strategies focus on channels of information, in the hope of creating systematically
effective and dynamic interdependencies without becoming directly involved in
specific technologies or projects?
Alternatively, should government policies focus on encouraging and
subsidizing strategic alliances among companies and universities to overcome
blockages or "reverse salients" in particular technologies with significance
for future product development? Mixing
and matching both of these strategies in different scientific disciplines,
technological fields and industrial sectors is a further possibility. Such a "hands on" strategy,
however, requires a greater science and technology policy capacity on the part
of the state, industry and academia since judgements of the level and type of
intervention in particular areas becomes more critical. These are the central questions of academic,
industry, government relations in societies of different traditions of
political-economy, and level and type of economic development, which we wish to
raise in this workshop.
Theoretical
framework
A "triple helix" of
academic-industry-government relations is likely to be a key component of any
national or multi-national innovation strategy in the late twentieth
century. The focus on interactions
between institutions of fundamental research "on the supply side" and
corporations has not only been reflected in technology policies, but also in
technology studies. Linear models of "demand pull" or
"technology push" have been superceded by evolutionary models that
analyze the developments in terms of networks (e.g., Nelson & Winter 1982;
Dosi et al. 1988; Leydesdorff & Van den Besselaar 1994). Non-linear dynamics has provided us with
co-evolutionary models: How do technologies and institutions co-evolve (Nelson
1994)? Under which conditions do they
"lock in" (David 1985; Arthur 1988)?
When can a "lock in" be considered as part of an emerging
infrastructure and when should it be avoided (cf. David and Foray 1994)? And over time: How is the social
infrastructure adjusted to cycles of emerging techno-economic developments
(Freeman and Perez 1988; Barras 1990)?
Three sources of variation have
been acknowledged in technology studies: (1) industrial sectors differ with
respect to their relations to the technologies that are relevant for the
developments in those sectors (e.g., Pavitt 1984); (2) different technologies
induce different patterns of innovation and diffusion (e.g., Freeman &
Perez 1988; Faulkner & Senker 1994); (3) systems of innovation (e.g.,
national systems of innovation) integrate and differentiate the various
functions differently (Lundvall 1988; Nelson 1993). The variations, however, are both functional and
institutional. The functional communications
can sometimes be codified in new institutional settings; the institutional
sectors (public, private and academic) that formerly operated at arms length
are increasingly working together, with a spiral pattern of linkages emerging
at various stages of the innovation process.
Institutional and national boundaries may be transcended in the course
of creating a new innovation environments, including the development of new
(inter‑)disciplinary discourses.
At the other end, start up firms are a common outgrowth of the
integration among the three sectors: arising from academic research groups,
national laboratories, and the laboratories of large corporations. National innovation systems are regionalized
and internationalized as innovation processes take place across national
boundaries, through cooperative arrangements among regions and firms
(Kohler-Koch, 1993).
Innovation systems, a
characteristic of the nation-state (Nelson 1993), are being supplemented by
regional and multi-national innovation systems within the European Union and
elsewhere. At the regional level, this
is not a new development. The New
England regional innovation system, named after a post war ring-road
"Route 128" originated in the mid-nineteenth century with the
founding of MIT, a new type of technological university designed to infuse
industry with the results of what is now known as "strategic
research" (Etzkowitz 1993). At the
cognitive level, however, scientists from different disciplines and specialties
are challenged across established boundaries, in order to reflexively search
for new forms of (functional) integration.
What is new is the spread of
technology policy to virtually all regions, irrespective of whether they are
research or industrially intensive. The
various systems which previously could be considered as functionally
differentiated, tend to be integrated at various levels of structure. Grasping
the competitive advantages seems to require the purposeful adjustment of the
various levels of integration and control (Porter 1990). Many international and
multi-national programs of the UN, the OECD, the World Bank and the European
Union assist economic development by relying on academic-industry-government
relations to achieve their goals (Nelson, 1993). Thus, a new mode of production is emerging based on linkages
among academia, industry and government.
Another indicator of this
development is the growing convergence among North America, Japan and Europe in
science, technology and industrial policy.
The Europeans, having concentrated on assisting larger firms through
pre-competitive research initiatives, are moving toward greater emphasis on
startups, a U.S. specialty until recently.
The Japanese, having brought the art of targeting "critical
technologies" representing future industrial growth to a high level, are
developing their academic basic research and graduate training capacities. The U.S., with an overcapacity of basic
research supply and undercapitalized intellectual property resources, is acting
to assist larger, as well as smaller, companies to take technologies off the
shelf and into the factory for production, both as defense conversion and
economic development policy. For its part, Europe will spend 13.1 billion ECU
on its Fourth Framework Program (1994‑98) to become more competitive with
the U.S. and Japan.
Policy programmes tend to call
for collaboration and integration.
However, one expects a complex dynamic system to reproduce also
differentiation, since differentiation allows for more complexity. Along which dimensions or at which levels
does one observe integration, and along which differentiation? How are the two mechanisms balanced and
reflexively optimized? And by which
actors in the network? Is the newly
emerging network system a further differentiation on top of the existing
systems or is it a new (e.g., more complex) mode of knowledge production and
control in itself? How do changes in the
knowledge infrastructure affect the intellectual organization of the
disciplines? What are the consequences
for reshaping of the university system: which are the emerging functions, and
which are the contexts? What are the
implications for higher education?
Institutional
implications
The need is felt for a broad
multi-faceted relationship between organizations, to carry innovation forward
and bring new products to market in the stringent international competitive
climate of the 90s. The director of R&D
in the U.S. for Henkel, the German chemical firm, has concluded that,
"Technology transfer is dead ...
The old 1950s model doesn't work anymore; the old way of hoping R&D
came up with something brilliant only works if you are the only game in
town." as the U.S. was in many technologies during that era (Giorden,
1994). The new paradigm is based on
meshing the disciplines of marketing, development and research, creating teams
within and across internal and external organizational boundaries.
For IBM, and other firms like it,
the issue is not so much the amount spent on R&D but the disconnect that
often exists between R&D and product development and marketing in these
companies. In their growth period, during the early post-war era, such firms typically
expanded by separating R&D, organizationally and geographically from more
mundane corporate functions. It is no
longer clear that by just subsidizing R&D the Clinton administration, or
the companies themselves, are sufficiently addressing the need for developing
technology transfer and commercialization capabilities for their research
campuses, within and among firms.
In this regard, various European
Union programs provide some partial models (Malerba 1993: 254‑255). In addition to traditional industrial
technologies, such as chemicals in which Europe has maintained great strength,
the European Union's 4th Framework program proposes to emphasize the life
sciences, especially biotechnology, medicine and health as well as agricultural
reform and rural development.
Environmental concerns, including lowering the pollution levels of
transport systems, are also driving the direction of 4th Framework R&D
programs. These initiatives run
parallel to proposals for green technology development in North America.
Given the noted sources of
variation, however, the ambitious programs are expected to lead to unintended
consequences. The interactions evolve
by operating: functions are differently differentiated and integrated during
cultural evolutions, and balances seem delicate. The level of standardization
is low in newly emerging systems (cf. Blauwhof & Leydesdorff 1993). Examples like "Route 128,"
"Silicon Valley" (Saxenian 1994), the "Cambridge
experience," or national experiences like Scandinavian examples point to
historical conditions which seem not easily reproduceable. How then can policies reflexively reshape
the co-evolution between technologies and institutions? Who are the strategic policy actors: does
the national state still play a vital role or has the reshaping to be left
largely to market forces? Are
neo-corporatist arrangements at the meso-level crucial? Do non-standard actors (like consultants and
liaison officers) play vital roles? In
which stages is which type of effort most likely to push the development in the
direction of emerging technologies and competitive advantages?
Niches can be maintained only in
specific contexts. Furthermore, the
anticipation on niche formation as breeding places for new developments
requires reflexive management of the social conditions of knowledge production
and control. Hence, university-industry
relations may play a key role: they have become a laboratory for the conscious
reshaping of the knowledge infrastructure under conditions that theoretical
uncertainty adds to the uncertainties of the markets. What have these quasi-experiments taught us about the dynamics of
the emerging mode of production? Additionally, issues about the role of the
state and private investors, and consequently about the nature of the property
rights on results, are placed on the agenda, given the various uncertainties in
the strategies and the corresponding risks in the investments.
Perhaps, newly emerging network
functions in relations between universities and industry have sufficiently been
codified at some places in order to carry new scientific discourses which
combine, for example, theorizing, engineering, and management
perspectives. Under which conditions is
inter-organizational discourse specific enough to carry intellectual development
(cf. Rosenberg 1982)? Can these
interdisciplinary discourses develop into specialties or are they temporary
missions which will be torn apart among existing disciplines in the longer run? How are the large European programmes (e.g.,
ESPRIT) evaluated from this perspective?
What is the effect of the U.S. industrial policy (e.g. ATP) and defense
conversion (TRP) programs? How has the
decline of "import substitution" policies in Latin America affected
local academic-industry relations? Did
these programs and policies lead to new standards of scientific and
technological achievement which may provide us with models for the further
development of higher education? What
might, for example, a "European," "Latin American" or
"Eastern European" entrepreneurial university which attempts to
institutionalize at the network level look like?
While a number of studies have
focussed on experiences in the US and the UK, less empirical information is
available about the effects of the assumed transitions from national systems to
international frameworks of S&T policy making in the emerging European
Union (Nelson 1993 and 1994; cf. Blume and Leydesdorff 1984). After a period of rapid growth of structures
at the relevant interfaces (e.g., transfer agencies, university-industry
networks) a tendency to leave selection to the market (e.g., by means of
patenting) can be observed. It has been
noted that the new dependencies may lead to deprivation of the university from
its autonomous and cultural functions, and thereby endanger the economy in
longer-term respects (e.g., the qualification structure; cf. Rosenberg and
Nelson 1994). Is university research
increasingly commercially driven? Has
scholarly education become obsolete; is the theoretically oriented intellectual
gradually replaced by the experimentalists who has learned to `manage'
theoretical knowledge pragmatically?
We are witnessing the
transformation of the role of state in academia, the role of corporations in
innovation and of the university in the economy (Etzkowitz 1983 and 1995). Coming from the three sectors, the members
of this workshop are participants in the creation of a new innovation
environment--a triple helix of academic-industry-government relations. In
summary, we envisage contributions from the following perspectives:
1. from
evolutionary economics focussing on the functions of the knowledge infrastructure
in advanced (industrial) systems, and on the
consequences for R&D-policies;
2. from
the sociology of science and technology and the sociology of higher education
about experiences with reshaping of parts of the knowledge infrastructure like
technological sciences and university R&D systems; and its in-depth
consequences for the intellectual reorganization of the disciplines;
3. from
policy analysis with an evaluative perspective on efforts to bring about
changes at the relevant science-technology-industry interfaces.
Empirical
contributions which combine two of these perspectives are particularly welcome
as are case studies of individual academic institutions and the development of
their industrial relations, historical-institutional analyses of the
transformation of national academic/science systems and modelling efforts which
use methods (e.g., from non-linear dynamics) in relation to the subject issue
(e.g., Brunner 1994).
Practicalities
The
workshop will be held on January 4‑6, 1996 in Amsterdam (The
Netherlands).
Extended
abstracts (two or three pages) should be submitted before August 1, 1995. The final programme date is November 1,
1996. Only papers that are available as
draft by this date will be included into the programme. All papers will be
refereed before the workshop.
We
intend to select from the workshop papers (which can have any length at this
stage) a number of ten to twelve for inclusion in a volume after thorough
rewriting on the basis of referee comments.
For
further information contact:
* Henry
Etzkowitz, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York,
10027, U.S.A. Tel. 212- 939 7028 fax: 212- 666 0140 email: etz@cs.columbia.edu
or
* Loet
Leydesdorff, Department of Science Dynamics, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, 1018 WV
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Tel. (+31)
20- 525 6598; fax: 20- 525 6579. E-mail: loet@sara.nl.
Programme
committee: Richard R. Nelson (Public Policy Research, Columbia University, New
York); Helga Nowotny (Wissenschaftsforschung, Vienna); Beatriz Ruivo (JNICT,
Lisbon); Jean-Jacques Salomon (CNAM, Paris); Peter Weingart (Sociology,
Bielefeld); Henry Etzkowitz (Sociology, State University of New York, Purchase
and SPI Stony Brook); Loet Leydesdorff
(Science & Technology Dynamics, Amsterdam).
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