Today’s emerging economies need to carefully manage tradeoffs to achieve technological sovereignty and a globally competitive position.

Despite the benefits of university-industry collaborations, concerns remain about their repercussions on the modes and content of scientific research. So far, only a handful of empirical studies exist on these issues. Based on a survey run among professors in German universities, we study how university-industry collaborations affect academic independence. We find that university-industry collaborations are related to higher challenges in keeping academic independence. Disentangling the effects between research collaborations and consultancy activities, we observe that professors engaging in both experiences are associated with lower perceptions of the barrier. Moreover, we test whether perceiving higher perceived barriers to academic independence influence research orientation and we find an increase in applied publications. Overall, university-industry collaborations are associated with higher challenges to academic independence which in turn are associated with a reorientation towards applied research. We conclude by discussing the implications for science policy.

We investigate whether the local economic effects of niche university actors depend on regional context. Focusing on private university campuses in Germany, we exploit their staggered foundation between 1990 and 2020 and estimate their effects using a conditional staggered difference-indifferences design at the postalcode level. Campus foundations raise local economic activity, but only gradually, with effects becoming statistically significant after about ten years. The effects are strongest in rural and intermediate regions, while urban regions show no significant effects. This pattern supports our argument that niche universities have greater potential to become significant actors in institutionally thinner rural regions.

Building on earlier studies of the digital divide, urban-rural disparities, and regional innovation systems, this paper analyses the state of the digital divide with a view to digital business growth and identifies the key enabling factors, providing a comparison of core and peripheral regions of Germany. It highlights differences between core and peripheral regions, showing the considerable roles of education and qualification levels, as well as socioeconomic factors, while providing limited confirmation of the often-suggested roles of digital infrastructure and of peripheral regions’ ability to benefit from the local environment. The paper contributes to the current debate on the digital divide by providing additional insights into its relation to digital entrepreneurship and the factors that promote its development.

The regional variety of actors is considered a key determinant in the last decade's rich literature on the geography of eco-innovation and green regional development. However, little is known about the extent to which regions differ in their specialization in new and established eco-innovation actors. In this article, we propose a regional typology based on green specializations concerning both incumbents and start-ups in the German transport sector. While many regions show green specializations in either start-ups or incumbents, only some regions manage to specialize in both. We find that the above-average regional specialization in eco-innovation does not seem to be primarily a phenomenon of urban areas, but rather depends on regions' human capital endowments and technological capabilities. The observed heterogeneity in eco-innovation specializations, both in innovation centers and lagging regions, calls for regional policies that are more sensitive to these differences.

Despite the multidimensionality of knowledge and technology transfer (KTT), existing quantitative evaluations predominantly focus on a limited range of channels, often resulting from the availability of data rather than theoretical considerations. To address this gap, we leverage unstructured data from university websites to develop indicators that provide a comprehensive view of universities' KTT activities. Applying large-languagetransformers to scraped websites of German universities, we identify five distinct KTT dimensions: engagement in collaborative research consortia with industry, technical consulting activities, start-up activities, the development of regional tech transfer hubs, as well as technology transfer offices. Based on exploratory regression analyses, we find that the intensity of the type of KTT activities varies with the regional environment as well as university characteristics. Moreover, our regressions unveil a synergistic relationship between KTT and basic research, where this finding again seems to depend strongly on the type of KTT activity.

Building on earlier studies of urban-rural disparities, regional capabilities, and the specifics of entrepreneurial dynamics in the periphery, this paper investigates the relationship between a set of local framework conditions and digital business growth in the peripheral regions of Germany. It demonstrates that the latter primarily depends on a dynamic entrepreneurial activity, local knowledge stock and presence of digital qualifications while it finds limited confirmation for the often suggested role of digital infrastructure. Methodologically, it contributes by applying topic modelling as a way to improve and complement more conventional classifications of entrepreneurial activities in the digital field. Thus, reflecting on the most recent dynamics of rapid technological development, this paper outlines the relationship between certain types of framework conditions and the specific types of digital business activity they favour.

This paper analyses the effects of new public management governance on academics' job choices. Based on a choice experiment carried out with faculty from a sample of Germany's leading technical universities, we find that working environments characterized by varying levels of administrative burdens and high expectations concerning third-party funding acquisition are detrimental to self-actualization and hence tend to repel potential candidates. More specifically, we find this effect to be most pronounced for those candidates that universities would be strategically most interested in: researchers with a strong track record and those with an interdisciplinary profile. Without denying potential benefits of external incentives for existing faculty, we therefore suggest acknowledging intrinsic motivation as the key driving factor of academics' choices and to design future governance structures accordingly.

The need to address environmental challenges through innovation-based transformative change has become more urgent than ever and the spatial dimension of pathways towards sustainability has attracted increasing scholarly interest. Over the last decade, research on environmentally oriented innovation has entered the geographical discourse from different directions. This paper starts with the premise that, among other contributions, two main directions of research can be identified within the current geographical discourse that do not yet interface much - a broad, yet conceptually more traditional debate on eco-innovation and a newer discourse around socio-technical transitions that adds a further perspective. Having justified this assumption by a short literature review, we perform a keyword-based literature search, which confirms that there are indeed two distinct bodies of literature and few studies to date that integrate features from both fields. Following this, an in-depth review of the sources clarifies the differences in perspective and the common object of analysis of the basic systemic elements of actors, institutions and technologies. While this juxtaposition illustrates why the two fields of research have hardly cross-fertilised each other so far, it also shows that they are in substance far from irreconcilable. On the contrary, the nuanced synthesis of research findings reveals numerous complementarities that constitute promising avenues for future geographical research. These are considered necessary to improve the understanding of the geography of innovation-based transitions towards sustainability.

This paper analyses the conditions and factors influencing non-university researchers’ career transitions back into academia. Using affiliation data in publications of German researchers, their cross-sector career transitions from the public research organisation Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and industry to universities are analysed. Although the rate of transitions is small, there are distinctive windows of opportunity at a junior career stage, especially for Fraunhofer researchers. Researchers who publish more and in more acclaimed journals, Fraunhofer researchers who co-publish with universities, and women are more likely to gain a university affiliation over the course of their career. These results indicate the influence of institutional proximity for cross-domain career transitions. The quality and impact of academic knowledge could be improved if the higher education sector was more open to recruitment of researchers from other sectors. Policy needs to target the barriers that preclude applied researchers from pursuing university careers.

Abstract Economic research emphasises the role of increasing returns to scale and critical mass in research and technology development. This suggests that countries benefit from specialising in certain technologies and can thereby bundle available resources. Using the example of the Exzellenzstrategie and the Zukunftsstrategie, we argue that German RTI policy lacks strategic prioritisation. The lack of focus implies that Germany spreads its resources too thinly over many technological alternatives and therefore fails to create critical mass within each of them. The guiding principles for a German RTI policy should focus on creating critical mass through specialisation..

We analyse the degree to which the popularity of scientific authors on Twitter and LinkedIn corresponds to publication-based indicators as to their visibility and interconnectedness. Departing from the extant literature’s focus on the visibility of individual papers, we turn to the popularity of individuals on social media platforms. We explore whether this popularity is reflected in the visibility that researchers achieve and the collaborations they maintain in the publication domain. Studying a large sample of applied researchers in Germany, we find congruence between researchers’ popularity on social media, and both their visibility and interconnectedness in the publication domain. Comparing the effects of Twitter and LinkedIn engagement, we furthermore find that the characteristics of this relationship are associated with the intended function of the social media platform in which researchers engage. We conclude that social media platforms are a relevant channel of academic communication, alongside existing channels of formal and informal exchange.

Academic research increasingly focuses on environmental sustainability as a specific societal mission to be addressed. However, the effects of the increasing sustainability orientation on output generation in public research organizations are largely unexplored. In this paper, we analyse the effects of the increasing importance of sustainability-oriented research topics on research and teaching efficiency in German universities in 2018. Our results are mixed. On the one hand, we find that a higher share of publications related to sustainability increases research efficiency. On the other hand, it decreases teaching efficiency. The latter negative effect seems to relate primarily to a notion of teaching efficiency associated with quantity rather than the quality of teaching output. We conclude that the tendency to focus academic research on challenge-driven sustainability orientation can have non-trivial effects on the efficiency of output generation and therefore needs to be considered ex-ante by policy-makers, administrators and university managers.

While deep learning models have greatly improved the performance of many tasks related to sentiment analysis and classification, they are often criticized for being untrustworthy due to their black-box nature. As a result, numerous explainability techniques have been proposed to better understand the model predictions and to improve the deep learning models. In this work, we introduce InfoBarometer, the first benchmark for examining interpretable methods related to sentiment analysis in the German automotive sector based on online news. Each news article in our dataset is annotated w.r.t. overall sentiment (i.e., positive, negative and neutral), the target of the sentiment (focusing on innovation-related topics such as e.g. electromobility) and the rationales, i.e., textual explanations for the sentiment label that can be leveraged during both training and evaluation.For this research, we compare different state-of-the-art approaches to perform sentiment analysis and observe that even models that perform very well in classification do not score high on explainability metrics like model plausibility and faithfulness. We calculated the polarity scores for the best method BERT and got an F-score of 73.6. Moreover, we evaluated different interpretability algorithms (LIME, SHAP, Integrated Gradients, Saliency) based on explicitly marked rationales by human annotators quantitatively and qualitatively.Our experiments demonstrate that the textual explanations often do not agree with human interpretations, and rarely help to justify the models decision. However, local and global features provide useful insights to help uncover spurious features in the model and biases within the dataset. We intend to make our dataset public for other researchers

In recent years, global technology-based competition has not only intensified, but become increasingly linked to a more comprehensive type of competition between different political and value systems. The globalist assumptions of the post-Cold War era that reliable mutually beneficial agreements could be reached with all nations, regardless of ideology, have been shattered. A previously less visible, mostly political, risk dimension has been brought to the fore by recent geopolitical and geo-economic developments. Against this background, the notion of technology sovereignty has gained prominence in national and international debates, cutting across and adding to established rationales of innovation policy. In this paper, we propose and justify a concise yet nuanced concept of technology sovereignty to contribute to and clarify this debate. In particular, we argue that technology sovereignty should be conceived as state-level agency within the international system, i.e. as sovereignty of governmental action, rather than (territorial) sovereignty over something. Against this background, we define technology sovereignty not as an end in itself, but as a means to achieving the central objectives of innovation policy - sustaining national competitiveness and building capacities for transformative policies. By doing so, we position ourselves between a naive globalist position which largely neglects the risks of collaboration and the promotion of near autarky which disregards the inevitable costs of creating national redundancies and reducing cooperative interdependencies. We finish by providing a set of policy suggestions to support technology sovereignty in line with our conceptual approach.

In recent years, new expectations have been placed on universities, demanding academic contributions towards solving large-scale, interdisciplinary challenges. This is in conflict with existing insights from university governance research, which emphasises that scientific communities focus on reproducing disciplinary practices that are unsuitable in addressing societal challenges, because the problems associated with them are usually large-scale, complex and interdisciplinary. In light of this seeming paradox, we revisit the question of how-and on which theoretical grounds-universities may still be able to develop suitable internal governance mechanisms that allow them to address complex societal challenges effectively. Because university leaders are usually unable to coerce individual researchers to address such challenges in their research simply through their bureaucratic powers, we will argue that university leaders can, however, leverage individual researchers' agency to deviate from routine and disciplinary practice by developing novel or legitimising existing interdisciplinary scripts necessary to deal with such societal problems. Specifically, we outline that university managements can create a dual role consisting of the communication of legitimising interdisciplinary research on societal challenges, as well as providing for the necessary degree of interdisciplinary coordination by convening researchers around these topics.

Social media is opening up new avenues for disseminating research outputs. While prior literature points to the essential role of Twitter in this context, evidence on what determines variation in researchers´ Twitter engagement remains scarce. In this account-level study of Twitter usage, we consider how research productivity, research quality, and participation in academic conferences relate to Twitter uptake, activity and popularity, while also taking into account differences between academic disciplines. We use a population sample comprising data on Twitter engagement of researchers employed at the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Europe´s largest applied research organization. We find that participation in academic conferences is strongly associated with Twitter uptake and popularity, but not with Twitter activity as such. We also find positive associations between research productivity and Twitter uptake as well as between research quality and popularity. Moreover, physicists use Twitter more than researchers from other disciplines, female researchers use Twitter less, and scientific age is negatively associated with Twitter activity. Our findings contribute to the literature on academic social media usage by providing indications for both push and pull mechanisms at play within social media research dissemination.

Nowadays there is a growing trend in many scientific disciplines to support researchers by providing enhanced information access through linking of publications and underlying datasets, so as to support research with infrastructure to enhance reproducibility and reusability of research results. In this research note, we present an overview of an ongoing research project, named VADIS (VAriable Detection, Interlinking and Summarization), that aims at developing technology and infrastructure for enhanced information access in the Social Sciences via search and summarization of publications on the basis of automatic identification and indexing of survey variables in text. We provide an overview of the overarching vision underlying our project, its main components, and related challenges, as well as a thorough discussion of how these are meant to address the limitations of current information access systems for publications in the Social Sciences. We show how this goal can be concretely implemented in an end-user system by presenting a search prototype, which is based on user requirements collected from qualitative interviews with empirical Social Science researchers.