Increasingly, principal investigators are tasked by funding agencies not only to expand knowledge in a particular field of inquiry, but also to manage and coordinate sets of diverse actors, including researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds and with different institutional...

This paper reviews the current academic thinking on knowledge transfer channels between universities and private industry, from a human resource perspective. It also offers a general framework for “re-organising” the literature, so as to identify gaps in the understanding of organisational...

President Obama has called for the development of new energy technologies to address our national energy needs and restore US economic competitiveness. In response, the Department of Energy has established new R&D modalities for energy research and development designed to facilitate...

This paper compares over a 12‐year period (1) patterns of contracting between a state transportation agency and its prime contractors providing engineering design services with (2) patterns between these prime contractors and their subcontractors. We find evidence of different contracting...

The vast majority of research collaboration among firms is informal. Unfortunately, little research has focused on informal, multi-institutional research collaboration, partly because by their very nature these collaborations are difficult to study systematically. In this study, we employ case...

The NSF engineering research centers (ERC) program served notice of a sea change in university research funding and institutional designs, representing a transition from department-based, principle investigator-oriented university science to a new center-based model encouraging universities to...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of university research centers as a Science and Technology policy mechanism. Using the case of nanotechnology, it assesses if establishing dedicated research centers at universities influences their patterns of knowledge production, and specifically the...

This article considers the role of domestic knowledge capabilities for developing countries and emerging economies, and in particular in the build-up of their national systems of innovation. Using bibliometric methods, we describe the geographic sources of knowledge and the users of Brazilian...

The academic literature on NSF's Engineering Research Center (ERC) program to date has been characterized with an emphasis that is somewhat disconnected from the stated goals of the program. The ERC program was established to accomplish two main goals: to improve engineering research and...