As universities are increasingly called by their national governments for a more entrepreneurial management of public research results, they started to develop internal structures and policies to take a proactive role in the commercialisation of university research. For the first time, this paper presents a detailed chronicle of how country-level…

Does organizational governance contribute to academic quality? Two top research universities are observed in-depth: Berkeley and the MIT. Three key factors are listed that help generate consistent and lasting high performance. Priority is allocated to self-evaluation and to the development of talent. Values and norms such as community membership,…

The analysis of social networks has remained a crucial and yet understudied aspect of the efforts to measure Triple Helix linkages. The Triple Helix model aims to explain, among other aspects of knowledge-based societies, "the current research system in its social context" (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2000:109). This paper develops a novel…

Despite the ubiquity and critical importance of science and technology in international affairs, their role receives insufficient attention in traditional international relations curricula. There is little literature on how the relations between science, technology, economics, politics, law and culture should be taught in an international context.…

When the journal "Minerva" was founded in 1962, science and higher educational issues were high on the agenda, lending impetus to the interdisciplinary field of "Science Studies" "qua" "Science Policy Studies." As government expenditures for promoting various branches of science increased dramatically on both sides of the East-West Cold War…

Despite major changes in the governance of universities overtly intended to transform them into authoritatively integrated collectivities, the extent of their organisational actorhood remains quite limited and varied between OECD countries. This is because of inherent limitations to the managerial direction and control of research and teaching…

"Academic drift" is a term sometimes used to describe the process whereby knowledge which is intended to be useful gradually loses close ties to practice while becoming more tightly integrated with one or other body of scientific knowledge. Drift in this sense has been a common phenomenon in agriculture, engineering, medicine and management…

It is commonplace to say that the modern economy is knowledge based but a moment's reflection points to the vacuity of this notion. For all economies are knowledge based and could not be otherwise. The question is rather how is one kind of knowledge based economy to be distinguished from another? This essay proposes that the answer may lie in…

There are a number of different forms of inter-organisational collaborative arrangements between universities at international, national and sub-national levels. This paper focuses on a particular form of inter-university collaboration mechanisms, which represents one of the key recent policy developments in Scotland. Research pooling initiatives…

Since its founding in 1863, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has occupied a special niche in the complex ecology of advice-giving in the United States. Established as a small, private organization with special responsibilities and obligations vis a vis the American people and government, the Academy has expanded considerably in the past…

The new prominence given to science for economic growth and industry comes with an increased policy focus on the promotion of commodification and commercialization of academic science. This paper posits that this increased interest in commodification is a new steering mechanism for governing science. This is achieved by first outlining what is…

A comparison of the engineering schools at UC Berkeley and Stanford during the 1940s and 1950s shows that having an excellent academic program is necessary but not sufficient to make a university entrepreneurial (an engine of economic development). Key factors that made Stanford more entrepreneurial than Cal during this period were superior…

The nuclear engineer emerged as a new form of recognised technical professional between 1940 and the early 1960s as nuclear fission, the chain reaction and their applications were explored. The institutionalization of nuclear engineering--channelled into new national laboratories and corporate design offices during the decade after the war, and…

This paper discusses the relationship between internationalisation, mobility, quality and equality in the context of recent developments in research policy in the European Research Area (ERA). Although these developments are specifically concerned with the growth of research capacity at European level, the issues raised have much broader relevance…

The article addresses the issue of dynamics of science, in particular of new sciences born in twentieth century and developed after the Second World War (information science, materials science, life science). The article develops the notion of search regime as an abstract characterization of dynamic patterns, based on three dimensions: the rate of…