Internationalisation, innovation, and academic–corporate co-publications

Research policy often asks for international academic collaboration or collaborations between universities and other actors in society. To improve the understanding of such collaborations, a systematic analysis of academic–corporate co-publications was conducted, with a focus on the international dimension. Based on the global volume of publications in the Scopus database, one result is that academic–corporate co-publications enjoy a higher citation impact than other types of publications. Another result is that such co-publications are to a large extent internationally co-authored. Studies of ten countries and the ten plus ten largest academic and corporate institutions in these countries in terms of academic–corporate co-publications confirm these results and provide further details. Finally, the results indicate a positive correlation between the share of academic–corporate co-publications in a country and the innovation performance in indices such as the Global Innovation Index and the European Innovation Scoreboard. This study highlights the need to consider the numbers of co-authors and the high share of international co-publications when analyses are based on academic–corporate co-publications. Even though academic–corporate co-publications only reflect a small part of all academic–corporate collaborations, academic–corporate co-publications are shown to be useful as one of many potential tools to assess collaborations between academic and corporate actors and associated investments in research and innovation. It is also argued that the results of the study support policies promoting academic–corporate collaborations leading to co-publications.