Why distance matters for collaboration with industry

Looking back at previous decades, universities in the United Kingdom have traditionally focused their attention on local firms when cooperating with the business sector. But the outcome of a recent comparative study, funded by the Centre for Global Higher Education and applying a radically new measurement approach, suggests that links with industry have gone global in recent years.

What is going on?

This large-scale study entitled Globalisation, Localisation and Glocalisation of University-Business Research Cooperation: General patterns and trends in the UK university system examined thousands of research publications co-produced by 48 of the largest research universities in the country.

By extracting the city names from the authors’ affiliate addresses on those publications and calculating the spatial distance (in kilometres) between each university and its partners in the business sector, the geographical distribution of those partnerships was calculated for the years 2008-17.

These publications in the scientific literature provide a window on what has happened in recent years.

Note that we are looking at a particular kind of cooperation: it is mainly curiosity-driven, discovery-oriented ‘basic’ research. And it is successful research; otherwise it wouldn’t have been published.

This tip of the iceberg is interesting nonetheless – not only because it reflects academic contributions to business sector R&D but also, to some degree, because it is an indicator of a university’s potential for ‘research commercialisation and innovation impact’.

Globalisation and Europeanisation of business partners

The location of partner firms was mapped into a series of distance zones and further analysed. The observed pattern in the 2017 data reveals a major share of foreign-based firms: 14.7% of the partner firms were within a 100 km radius from the university’s home town, 21.3% were located mostly elsewhere in the UK or Ireland (100-499 km), while 28.9% were located mainly on the European continent (500-4,999 km) and the remaining 33.8% were scattered further across the globe.

The annual growth trends during those 10 years reveal a pervasive process of internationalisation or globalisation. An increasingly large share of those research connections involve partner firms at least 500 km from the UK university’s home town. The total number of connections with local firms has also increased, albeit at a much lower rate.

On the whole, ‘globalisation’ has clearly outpaced ‘localisation’. The average annual growth rate of cooperation with partners at more than 5,000 km was 11%, whereas engagement with close-distance local partners, within a 50 km range, increased by a mere 3%.

The largest increase of research cooperation, however, with an average annual growth rate of 12%, occurred within a 500-4,999 km distance zone. In other words, UK universities have also been heavily engaged in a process of ‘Europeanisation’ as far as cooperating with industry is concerned.

These productive ties are not necessarily one-on-one relationships between a single university and firm because research collaboration within the European context often relates to European Commission funding programmes in Brussels which often involve operating in larger public-private consortia with several universities (from the UK and elsewhere) and a range of small or larger firms across Europe.

UK universities have become increasingly embedded in the industry-relevant segment of the European Research Area and are therefore vulnerable in the event of a no-deal Brexit.

The need for an R&D local active business sector

Why are some universities more focused on local firms while others seem to prefer international partners? Having access to a range of background data on individual UK universities, from the UK Office for National Statistics as well as other sources, we were able to conduct a series of statistical analyses to help identify explanatory factors.

For each separate distance zone we examined which particular characteristics of a university were associated with producing relatively high numbers of publications in partnership with industry.

Not surprisingly, an R&D-active local business sector in the UK is highly relevant across all distance zones; universities need a bedrock of local business partners to develop successful joint research projects with industry, irrespective of where all their business sector partners are located in the UK or worldwide.

The results also indicate that the driving forces of local university-business research cooperation may significantly depend on the spatial distance between the university and the partnering firm.

For example, universities with many ‘close distance’ collaborations, involving distances of less than 50 kilometres from the centre of the university’s home town, have relatively large numbers of researchers with dual affiliations (at both the target university and at a firm in the business sector); these universities also tend to have more consultancy contracts with firms (both large and small). Expanding the distance zone to 100 km changes the picture considerably.

Universities with large numbers of these ‘50-99 km collaborations’ are, among other differences, more inclined to employ ‘crossover researchers’ who move between the university and the business sector.

Knowledge demand vs knowledge supply

Overall, these differential findings tend to reflect disparities between general characteristics of ‘metropolitan’ universities (in the Greater London area), and the UK’s other, more ‘regional’, universities.

On the whole, we find three general patterns in how universities have evolved in recent years: 18 of them display significant ‘glocalisation’ (rapid growth in large-distance cooperation; moderate growth in close-distance ranges); five have become strongly globalised (but not localised), while the other 25 universities show no distinctive or significant growth patterns.

Half of the UK’s research-intensive universities seem to have (further) globalised – in one way or another – in their outreach to industry. This general tendency is undoubtedly driven by a complex mix of interconnected determinants.

Simplifying matters, the process is driven by an interplay between ‘knowledge demand’ factors, such as a relative lack of suitable R&D partners in the local area and an abundance elsewhere, and ‘knowledge supply’, where universities pursue the available opportunities offered elsewhere to engage with industry in order to develop and monetise their knowledge assets through joint research with business enterprises.

Although this analytical approach captures only one specific element of how universities have interacted and cooperated with the business sector, the findings of our study are revealing as to how the UK university system has simultaneously responded to local constraints and developments in the UK and the opportunities offered by international R&D environments.

As such, our study taps into a novel, rich source of comparative information that may prove valuable as a supplement to the UK’s Higher Education–Business and Community Interaction survey. Our distance-based analytical approach may possibly also provide new performance indicators on university knowledge transfer for the UK’s Knowledge Exchange Framework.

Robert Tijssen is a co-investigator on the Centre for Global Higher Education’s global higher education engagement research programme and is professor of science and innovation studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He is also a professor at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.