European funding and development of nanotechnologies and nanosciences
Creators: name: Villard, Lionel
name: Perruchas, François
name: Scherngell, Thomas
name: Barber, Michael
name: Larédo, Philippe
name: Molas-Gallart, Jordi
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2020
Subjects: knowledge production
geographical agglomeration and networks
nanotechnologies
european research funding

description: There are multiple on-going debates about knowledge distribution or concentration worldwide. Recent work done by Grossetti et al. 2015 shows a ‘deconcentration’ of knowledge production, visible not only at country level (linked to the periodic rise of new countries in the overall scientific production landscape, a long-lasting phenomenon) but also at metropolitan level. For Europe, this raises one central question: does this result that applies to the whole of scientific production also applies to frontier science? We have addressed this question for science and technology productions in the nano field. The attempts to characterise the dynamics of nano S&amp;T are not new (Noyons et al., 2003). We have developed a fully lexical approach (Kahane and Mogoutov, 2007) which remained however static (considering only the whole period covered). We have updated it since in order to account for the explorations made proposing a ‘dynamic‘ approach (Kahane et al., 2014). The exploration of the first dataset (1998-2006) enabled a characterisation of dynamics highlighting very strong agglomeration effects since 200 ‘clusters’ (very near in their bottom-up definition to the US definition of metropolitan areas and to the OECD recent developments on “functional urban areas”, OECD 2012) concentrate over 80% of world knowledge production (Delemarle et al., 2009). They provide a very different image than when keeping only track of national developments, thus corroborating the ‘deconcentration’ approach. These clusters gather over 80% of publications. As 70% of these publications come from more than one organisation, we hypothesised that a majority, for a science at the frontier, might be internal to clusters, and this was the case but to a far lower extent than expected, having 40% of total publications being inter-cluster. Characterising collaboration practices (Larédo and Villard 2015) drove to two major results. First the share of intercontinental collaborations remained marginal (around 8% of total collaborations). This drove us to focus on the 80 European clusters and their collaborations as a dynamics per se. It showed that inter-country links are more important than intra-country ones, once account is taken of one central phenomenon: the very ‘national’ structure of linkages within the UK. This may also explain as well why, probably for the first time in science history, neither Oxford nor Cambridge play central roles in the European dynamics of science production. They are replaced by ‘newcomers’ at world level, such as Louvain, Julich or Grenoble. This very European nature of collaborations and networks in turn drove us to consider the role that European funding might play in this concentrated but geographically distributed knowledge production pattern. While there are numerous works on the spatio-temporal dynamics of European funding, in particular the European framework programme (FP) (see e.g, Scherngell and Barber 2011, Scherngell and Lata 2013), there are few empirical works that relate European funding to the spatial distribution of knowledge (see e.g. Hoekman et al. 2013, Di Cagno et al. 2016, Wanzenböck and Piribauer 2016). Against this background, the objective of this work is to investigate the role of FP funding for knowledge creation in nanoscience and technology. In our conceptual approach, we shift attention to two distinct dimensions of knowledge creation: One linked to exploration and the spreading of excellence, and the other associated with the development of exploitation capabilities. We consider publications as markers of exploration and patents as markers of exploitation (technology). The two spatial distribution of publications vs. patents differs remarkably across the European territory (Laredo et al., 2010) with, for example, the UK playing a strong role in publications, while Germany plays a major role in patents. This drives us to test three hypotheses: H1 European FP funding tends to reinforce the spatial concentration around central nodes of excellence in the Europe H2 European FP funding correspond to a maturing of the knowledge base and thus we can identify a stronger effect of the FPs on exploitation, H3 European FP funding is particularly conducive for the constitution of a number of sub-spaces that poorly connect with central nodes both in exploration and in exploitation To be able to test these hypotheses, we rely on the following datasets: The NANO database for publications and patents about nanotechnology, covering the time period 2000-2011. For publications, one important aspect is to build indicators of quality, complementary to indicators of size. We use for this citations and well-established measures of excellence (share of top 1 and top 10% cited articles in total production of a FUA). This enables to construct both absolute (‘market share’) and relative (‘performance’) measures. We remain at the level of absolute measures for patents focusing only on transnational priority patents (see de Rassenfosse et al. 2013 and Laurens et al., 2015) The EUPRO database on EU funded projects. EUPRO comprises systematic information on R&amp;D projects and name-standardized participating organizations funded by the EU FP. It covers information on projects and, particularly relevant for this study, on the address of the participating organisations. In order to trace relevant funded projects in nanoscience and technology, we have used a semantic analysis to identify ‘nano’- based projects using a simple query on 2 fields (subject index, project title and project objectives). A database of European metropolitan areas, based on OECD FUA approach (OECD 2012) and corresponding to 672 FUAs. Methodological developments were made to allocate addresses to FUAs (Villard 2016) The ETER database (Lepori, 2016), which contains information on Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Europe, to be able to estimate the number of Phd awarded in each FUA as a proxy measure of the scientific capacities The OECD Regional database, the Geonames and the EUROSTAT R&amp;D database to estimate respectively for each FUA its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Population and Gross Expenditure in R&amp;D (GERD). We employ descriptive analyses, spatial visualisations, network analytic techniques and econometric techniques to address the three hypotheses described above. To assess the role of EU funding on knowledge exploration and exploitation, we employ a regression framework for limited dependent variables given the count nature of our dependent variables, relating the number of Nano publications and patents in Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) to the participation intensity in EU FPs, controlling for other factors influencing exploration and exploitation like the economical and scientific capabilities of the FUA. To understand the evolution of the FUA’s collaborations and the influence between the 3 dimensions (European funding, knowledge exploration and knowledge exploitation), we construct 3 different geographical network and use social network analysis techniques to identify cores and peripheries. We then investigate different techniques (multi-layer network analysis, estimation of spatial spillovers) to understand how the FUA’s position in one network is connected to its position in the other two, and how FUA’s situation depends on its geographical neighbours. Preliminary results show that the EU funding plays a role in the metropolitan areas’ participation in the nanotechnology knowledge exploration and exploitation. However, EU funding is not the only determinant for this participation, other determinants must also play a part as there is a clear difference in the relative role and centrality of metropolitan areas in the 3 different networks. These results show that we need comparative approaches of the articulation between European funding and explorative / exploitative activities in nano S&amp;T at European level.
description: This work has been presented at the Eu-SPRI Vienna 2017 Conference, the STI 2017 Conference and the 4th Geography of Innovation Conference. This version is the result of the feedback received during these presentations.