La explotación comercial del conocimiento: ¿nos encaminamos hacia una convergencia institucional entre las empresas y la ciencia?

In this paper we want to try to take stock of the present situation on academic-industry links and interrogate this notion of convergence. Ultimately, we argue that the idea is flawed because it misconceives how patterns of knowledge-flow in the innovation system operate. It implies that institutional structures of the firm and the university begin to converge, whereas we want to argue that one has to map the multiple structures that come and go among the suppliers and users of knowledge. These structures are made up of ''''knowledge constituencies'''' in which knowledge is translated, exchanged and exploited to serve members'''' immediate needs. But we want too to suggest that to the extent that a translation and alignment of interests are required to build these constituencies there are important institutionally built differences between public and private knowledge bases. We shall try to show this through a discussion which is theoretical yet empirically grounded in research which the authors have conducted over a number of years on British universities and intellectual property rights.