Abstract
What factors influence the relationship between the academic research and the knowledge- transfer activities of academics, in particular in ‘catch-up’ countries like South Korea? To address this research question, after first conducting a critical review of existing theoretical and empirical studies, we put forward a conceptual framework based on the twin concepts of ‘synergy’ and ‘separation’ modes, together with a number of accompanying hypotheses. These hypotheses, along with others that emerged from subsequent interviews, are then tested using various statistical models. After taking into account the specific characteristics of scientific communities in rapidly catching-up counties such as Korea, we find that not only are individual characteristics (such as the gender, age, discipline, and patenting activity) of academics significantly related to the generation of a ‘synergy mode’ (i.e. a positive relationship between academic research and knowledge-transfer activities) among academics, but so too are a number of contextual characteristics (e.g. laboratory size and type of university).
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Notes
The 65 Korean university professors interviewed between 7 May and 27 June 2007 can be classified into two groups: the first group consists of 13 professors who are in charge of the office of research affairs or the office of university-industry collaboration, while the second group contains 52 professors in different science and engineering disciplines as well as in different types of universities. On the one hand, the directors of the office of research affairs or the office of university-industry collaboration were chosen in order to investigate the overall orientation and strategy of the organisation visited; each interview took at least one hour to complete. Following a typology of Korean universities developed by Kwon (2009a), the 13 universities were also chosen as representatives of ten different types of Korean universities in science and engineering (for details, see the footnote to Table 2 and Appendix). On the other hand, in terms of the individual level, the 52 interviewees chosen, who are either on the tenure track or already tenured in different science and engineering disciplines, belong to the ten different types of universities. These interviews again lasted not less than one hour. The disciplines were classified into three categories: natural sciences such as mathematics and physics; traditional engineering fields such as mechanical and electronic engineering; and recently developed engineering fields such as bio-technology and nano-technology. Thereafter, according to the period of recruitment, senior and junior professors have been categorized in each department or major according to their discipline. The interview data are also used later to help interpret the results of the statistical tests of the hypotheses suggested here.
This result may be explained by the recent recruitment policy of Korean universities. According to interviews with several directors of the office of research and industrial collaboration, universities prefer academics with industrial experience rather than those without when it comes to the recruitment of professors. Industrial researchers in their fifties are now recruited as professors, which was quite rare before 2000. Therefore, comparatively junior academics in their middle age are not difficult to find on campus. This fact may reduce the significance of career stage in models 1 and 2.
In this analysis, we focus on the relationship between the career variable and the two modes in models 1and 2. In the discussion, we interpret the choice of academics between the two modes as being related to the period of academics’ employment in universities (i.e. the distinction between junior and senior groups), and to their age. However, it is impossible to distinguish whether the synergy mode is influenced more by the fact that they belong to the junior group in universities, or because they belong to a later cohort group equipped with a superior knowledge base. As a result, due to the confounding of the career and cohort effects, a ‘pure career’ effect cannot be identified. Moreover, in model 3, the confounding of age and cohort effects can be discussed in a similar vein. Therefore, in this discussion, career and age variables are interpreted only as whether the academics belong to the ‘senior’ group and ‘older’ group rather than to the career effect and the age effect respectively. In later studies, by collecting pooled data consisting of several groups of cohorts, we hope to separate age and career effects from the cohort effect.
As noted earlier, we can change the qualitative definition of the synergy mode from ‘academics who replied positively to all three questions’ to ‘academics who replied positively to at least two of the three relevant questions’.
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Acknowledgments
This paper is based on the doctoral thesis carried out by the first author and supervised by the second (jointly with Professor Aldo Geuna). The authors would like to thank Professor Keun Lee and Dr. Chaejun Song (the two PIs of a KRF project and an IDRC project respectively) for their cooperation in terms of the collection of the survey data on which this paper is partly based.
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Kwon, KS., Martin, B.R. Synergy or separation mode: the relationship between the academic research and the knowledge-transfer activities of Korean academics. Scientometrics 90, 177–200 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0513-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-011-0513-8