Technological innovation in GRIs, universities, and the private sector: evidence from the chemical technology network in South Korea

Yong Jin Kim ()
Additional contact information
Yong Jin Kim: Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology

Scientometrics, 2023, vol. 128, issue 11, No 4, 5929-5948

Abstract: Abstract As national R&D grows in scale, government-funded research institutes (GRIs) are being increasingly criticized for their low research productivity and the role of GRIs itself has become ambiguous. Hence, this study aims to investigate whether GRIs differ from universities or the private sector in terms of technological innovation and if so, how. This study also examines chemical technology as a case study, as technological innovation is active in this field and GRIs are present in relevant areas. Among the research and development projects registered in the National Science and Technology Information Service in South Korea, 4895 projects that used chemical technology were set as analysis targets: 560 projects with GRIs as the research agent, 4097 projects with universities as the research agent and 238 projects with the private sector as the research agent. Of the various indicators of technological innovation, this study examined the overall network structure characteristics and core technologies. The findings are as follows. First, GRIs and universities have similar core technologies, whereas they differ in overall network structure characteristics. Second, GRIs and the private sector have similar overall network structure characteristics, whereas they differ in terms of core technologies. These findings indicate that, at least in chemical technology, GRIs achieve technological innovation in a different form from universities and the private sector. The results of this study will likely provide implications for researchers and policymakers when establishing technological innovation policies for each research agent in the future.

Keywords: Technological innovation; Research institutes; R&D; Network analysis; Government-funded research institutes; 05C82; 90B15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O25 O32 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-023-04820-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:128:y:2023:i:11:d:10.1007_s11192-023-04820-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-023-04820-4

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().