Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : October 29, 2018 - October 30, 2018
Effective means for knowledge transfer between universities and industry are central to current debates on industry competitiveness. However, the experience of promoting knowledge transfer is mixed, especially in the lagging regions where demand is low. Consequently, there is an interest in identifying whether particular forms of university-industry linkage can lead to localized benefits even when applied in lagging regions. In the UK one scheme for promoting knowledge exchange through the seconding of people is the Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs), which has been in operation since the early 1980s. As the KTPs involve the placement of a graduate within the partner company with regular supervision from an academic then it has been assumed that this scheme tends to be more localized. This paper examines whether projects are localized, whether the programme has been taken up across all UK regions evenly, and therefore whether this kind of programme is therefore appropriate for a regionally sensitive innovation strategy. The data analysis is divided into two sections. The first section uses data on all KTPs completed by 2012 drawing upon a database of about 6000 projects. This offers the chance to extract generalizations about the localization of industry-university linkages. The second section uses more detailed data on the location of companies and focuses on the ten universities within the dataset with the highest level of participation in KTPs. Social network analysis results showed that proximity is important for KTP cooperating partners. It is shown that the peak in travel time more or less consistently shows up at about 25 minutes regarding the top ten universities. We also show at least a slight indication towards supporting the hypothesis that interregional or more distant linkages more often involve bigger sized companies.
