How Engineering Sciences Can Impact Industry in a Global World

Maureen McKelvey, Professor, has created and led this research project (cf. Principal Investigator, PI). McKelvey’s execution of this project in the research team has included both conceptual work as well as empirical studies. The research team has focused upon university-industry interactions in engineering, starting from the university, in order to discussion both the commercialization of academic research through entrepreneurship as well as academic engagement, defined as knowledge-based relationships. A mixed methods approach has been used. The qualitative  research is based upon semi-structured interviews and written material to discuss perceived rationale, benefits, capabilities, and long-term development. The quantitative data includes academic patents, papers and metrics for scientific outcomes as well as technological outcomes and knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial firms. Her team consisted of researchers directly funded through the project, as well as a number of PhD students and post-doctoral scholars financed through other projects, but working on related topics. Our three contributions below provide evidence and insights into how the knowledge economy is changing in Sweden.

Three particularly important contributions from McKelvey’s project

1) Developed conceptualizations of how universities are changing their interactions with society, specifically in engineering. Academic engagement defined as knowledge networks requires that both the partners of university and industry respectively develop capabilities for interacting around advanced knowledge creation. In doing so, they also need organizational structures such as centers and research programs. These organizational structures help to define the rules of the game, and mitigate the divergent goals and incentives to engage in knowledge creation in industry and universities. Scientists interacting in university-industry interactions thus face what is called differing institutional logics. We propose that one way to solve these conflicts is to develop hybrid spaces, with specific types of work practices, in order to balance these minority and majority logics. Moreover, we should how specific configurations for interaction can differ for types of engineering areas, but that the joint production of knowledge for most technologies appear to benefit from medium levels of cognitive distance between partners including university, industry and public public actors.

 2) Evaluated the structural conditions of policy initiatives to stimulate the performance of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial (KIE) firms through education. We examined a variety of entrepreneurship education in Sweden, in terms of differing mixes of theoretical and empirical educational practices. While we do not evaluate educational outcomes, we do find that entrepreneurial education can be constituted through a variety of configurations, which likely affect later outcomes in starting KIE firms, by affecting students’ ability to identify innovative opportunities and their willingness to tackle risk. Moreover, we find that in technological areas characterized by repeated collaborative engineering research, path dependence can be explained by individual-based knowledge networks with persons with PhD degrees as well as requires specialized capabilities in both universities and firms. This suggests the importance of policy initiatives to promote PhD education and mobility.

3) Examined and explained different patterns of academic engagement and university-industry interactions involving firms in high-tech, medium-tech and low-tech sectors. We find that nanotechnology tends to be driven by the commercialization of research results by academic scientists, whereas engineering for sports technology (specifically equestrian sports) tends to be driven by student projects with a wide variety of stakeholders. The field of control, signals and systems in Sweden has a broad range of deep interactions between university and industry, involving researchers as well as students, and with companies with deep technical knowledge.