• Media type: Electronic Conference Proceeding
  • Title: The geography of collaborative knowledge production: entropy techniques and results for the European Union
  • Contributor: Frenken, Koen [Author]
  • Published: Louvain-la-Neuve: European Regional Science Association (ERSA), 2002
  • Language: English
  • Origination:
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  • Description: Economic development has become understood as being crucially dependent on knowledge production and innovation. Two important features of knowledge production concern its spatial concentration and its embeddedness in collaborative networks. The understanding of economic and scientific development thus requires indicators that capture the spatial and networked nature of knowledge production. This paper aims to contribute by developing and applying an integration measure that indicates the extent to which an organisation is integrated within a network. This measure, being based on the entropy of frequency distributions of collaborative projects, can be applied at any level of aggregation (cf. Frenken 2000). In this study, the focus of analysis is on European integration at the level of cities, countries and the European Union as a whole. The integration measure indicates the degree in which the observed distribution of collaborations differs from the distribution that would have resulted when partner selection would have been random (maximum entropy) indicating perfect integration. Using data taken from the Science Citation Index on inter-institutional collaborations in scientific output of EU countries in the period 1993-2000, European, national and regional patterns in scientific collaboration are analysed. The analysis in divided in three parts. The first part deals with the analysis of national and European collaboration. Results obtained so far (Frenken 2000) show that the European Union has indeed become more integrated, i.e. that the distribution of collaborations has become more random over time. Decomposition of the results shows that the higher level of integration has resulted solely from a more evenly distributed pattern of country-country collaborations, while the bias in national collaborations has not decreased. From a policy perspective, one could argue that European funding, for what concerns European collaborations, has indeed resulted in decreasing biases among countries, but has not resulted in ...
  • Access State: Open Access