Do research institutes benefit from their network positions in research collaboration networks with industries or/and universities?
Introduction
In today's highly competitive and open environment, the inter-organizational research collaboration has become more and more important for national innovation systems (see, e.g., Lundvall et al., 2002; Zhao et al., 2015). Research institutes, as the critical actors in the inter-organizational research collaboration, are expected to become the engines of economic development and competitiveness by promoting knowledge creation and transfer in their inter-organizational research collaboration with industries and/or universities (Zhang et al., 2016). In fact, the roles and function that research institutes play are different from those of universities and industries in national innovation systems (De Fuentes and Dutrenit, 2012, Zhang et al., 2016). Specifically, the research institutes usually devote efforts on cutting-edge research in science and technology (S&T) field and are committed to serving the major national S&T needs (Bai, 2016), the universities are the major educational and training institutions (Liu and White, 2001), and the industry sector focuses efforts on providing services and products by S&T. These differences in their roles and function indicate the necessity of interactions among them for complementary advantages. Thus, more and more innovative organizations have deemed IUR collaboration as an important way for enhancing their innovative competitiveness. At the same time, the Industry-University-Research Institute (IUR) collaboration has been deemed as a key strategy and approach for improving national innovative capability in many countries (Zhang et al., 2016). The IUR collaboration has attracted the increasing attention of scholars (e.g., Banal-Estañol et al., 2015; Guan and Zhao, 2013; Laursen et al., 2011; Rentocchini et al., 2014; Perkmann et al., 2011; Zhang et al., 2016). In this context, an interesting and practically valuable topic catches our attention. That is, “Does the research institutes get benefits from their research collaboration with industries and/or universities?”
Unfortunately, to our knowledge, this interesting topic has not been explored so far even though it may provide some significant implications for research institutes to effectively coordinate their research collaboration relationships with industries and/or universities. As Zhang et al. (2016) noted, most of current studies neglected the important role that research institutes play in the national innovation systems and thus excluded them from the analysis or only treated them as subsidiary bodies included in the category of university sectors when examining the research collaboration across research institutes, universities and industries (e.g., Scandura, 2016; Welsh et al., 2008; Orozco and Ruiz, 2010), and little attention is devoted to the impact of IUR collaboration on the scientific performance of research institutes. To fill this research gap, our study focuses on this topic from a network perspective.
To reveal the influence mechanism between IUR collaboration and the scientific performance of research institutes, this study attempt to employ Social Network Analysis (SNA) to examine whether the research institutes’ scientific performance depends on their bilateral/trilateral research collaborations with industries or/and universities. In this manner, this study contributes to the existing literature in following several aspects. First, in contrast to existing literature that largely neglected research institutes and mainly focused on the relationship between the firms’ or universities’ performance and their structural characteristics within inter-organizational collaboration networks (e.g., Guan and Zhao, 2013; Schilling and Phelps, 2007; Paruchuri, 2010; Phelps, 2010), this paper investigates the inter-organizational research collaboration systematically from the perspective of research institutes, which can provide some preliminary empirical evidence on the impact of IUR collaboration on scientific performance of research institutes. Second, this paper contributes to the innovation network studies. Our research findings show that the effects of network positions of research institutes on their performance exhibit diverse manners in different networks. This indicates that the network structure and composition in different inter-organizational collaboration contexts can affect the influence mechanism of network positions on performance, which is largely ignored by prior research on inter-organizational innovation networks (e.g., Guan and Zhao, 2013; Paruchuri, 2010; Phelps, 2010). Third, this paper explores the inter-organizational research collaboration across the industries, universities and research institutes in the context of China, which has not been fully explored so far (Chen and Guan, 2011, Gao et al., 2014). Thus this paper enriches the empirical research of IUR collaboration in the newly industrialized economy (NIE) context. Finally, being different from the previous studies that tended to use the panel data of a particular research field to construct the whole network of inter-organizational collaboration and then examined the impact of the network structure on the performance of participants (e.g., Guan and Zhao, 2013; Schilling and Phelps, 2007; Paruchuri, 2010; Phelps, 2010), this paper uses the longitudinal data of the focal organization to create the ego-networks of this organization with other different organizations and focuses on the relationship between the focal organization’ performance and its network characteristics. Thus this paper may be an exploratory study providing a fresh perspective for the studies on the performance of the focal organization in the inter-organizational collaboration network.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the theoretical background and develops hypotheses. Section 3 introduces research setting, data, network construction, variables as well as estimation method. Section 4 presents analytical results. In Section 5, we make discussion on research findings and present some implications for theory and practice; besides, the limitations of our study and future research are also presented. Finally, we summarize our conclusions in Section 6.
Section snippets
Theory background and hypotheses
In the current “open innovation paradigm”, the inter-organizational research collaboration can help participants share the costs of sizeable investments (Chesbrough and Appleyard, 2007, Guan and Wei, 2015), reduce risks (Liyanage, 1995), search for knowledge inputs and gain access to complementary resources (Guan et al., 2015, Marquardt, 2013), facilitate information and knowledge flows between partners (Chesbrough et al., 2008, Gomes-Casseres et al., 2006, Mowery et al., 1996, Schilling, 2015)
Research setting and data collection
In this study, we test these hypotheses in the context of China's science and technology innovation system. Specifically, we choose three different but relational inter-organizational collaboration networks of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a typical composite research institute in China, with industries or/and universities as our research sample. There are three reasons for our choice. First, the inter-organizational research collaboration across research institutes, industries and
Empirical analysis and results
The descriptive statistics about variables in three (UR, IR and IUR) collaboration networks are presented in Table 1, and the correlation analysis results between variables are shown in Table 2. In addition, Table 3a, Table 3b, Table 3c respectively reports the results of negative binomial models for the scientific performance of the CAS in three collaboration networks. Moreover, Fig. 5, Fig. 6 vividly present the effects of the CAS's network position (degree centrality and structural holes
Research findings and discussions
The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the research institutes get benefits from their network positions in the inter-organizational research collaboration network setting. For this purpose, we construct three (bilateral or trilateral) different inter-organizational research collaboration networks of research institutes with industries or/and universities as our multi-scenario sample, which enriches the empirical studies concerning the impact of the inter-organizational research
Conclusions
Even though current studies have devoted much attention on the relationship between network position and organizational performance in the inter-organizational collaboration network, the issue whether the research institutes’ scientific performance is influenced by their network positions in the inter-organizational collaboration network has not yet examined so far. To fill this glaring gap, this study reveals the relationships between research institutes’ network positions and research
Acknowledgments
The work in this paper was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project number 71471170; 71233003; 71103173), the Major Research Task of Institute of Policy and Management in Chinese Academy of Sciences (Project number Y201121Z01), the Beijing Cairncross Economic Research Foundation (Project number 2016), the program for scientific research start-up funds of Guangdong Ocean University, the innovation strong school project of Guangdong Ocean University, and the Research
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The authors contribute equally to this paper.