4.1. Motives, Barriers and Patterns of Knowledge Diffusion via Academic Engagement
Among the 776 respondents of the survey, 56.06% of these researchers declare the existence of a cooperation link with an actor in the application sphere. While more than half of the respondents cooperated with the practice, we still consider this information to be worrisome. Employees of Slovak universities are most often defined as pedagogical and research employees at the same time while the scope of their work also includes developing cooperation with actors in the external environment. However, as the results of the survey showed, at most, almost half of the university’s creative staff was in contact with the application sphere thanks to the collection of data for their scientific research activities.
The emergence of interpersonal cooperation linkages between researchers and non-academic actors in Slovakia does not differ significantly in terms of the affiliation to a scientific area of the researcher. If we classify collaborating academics into the two broadest scientific areas (social sciences, life and technical sciences), we find that while 55.11% of respondents from life and technical disciplines cooperate with the practice, in the case of social sciences, it is up to 57.18% of respondents. In terms of gender, men cooperate with the application sphere more often (51.14% of the sample) than women (44.00% of the sample). Our assumption is that the seniority of researchers influences academic engagement is supported by the result that 51.92% of doctors, 60.31% of associate professors and up to 71.91% of professors in the sample were engaged in cooperation with an external actor.
Figure 1 displays shares of cooperating researchers in our sample that were engaged in chosen sectors that were the subject of our interest. Among the academics that participated on academic engagement, the majority kept cooperating linkage with an actor of the private sector (74.1%), while more than 40% were cooperating with state government bodies and organisations and third sector actors. This information stresses the growing importance of the third sector institutions in regional innovation systems even in conditions of a post-socialistic country.
Another question of key importance was whether informal linkages influence the dynamics of academic engagement and knowledge transfer based on interpersonal cooperation to a negligible extent. The opposite probably turns out to be a reality.
Table 2 shows the proportions of cooperating academics in a sample (those that had at least one case of cooperation with an external actor in 2018) that used listed knowledge transfer channels to shift knowledge/information towards an external partner formally and informally. Academics in our sample provide support to non-academic actors most often through counselling. In 2018, more than a third of cooperating respondents provided counselling to non-academic actors, while 22.4% reported formal counselling (under contract) and 26.5% of respondents declared that they also provided informal counselling. Although this is the only transfer channel where we have seen a higher proportion of academics collaborating more informally than formally, looking at the results for other channels in
Figure 2, it is evident that under the conditions of Slovakia, the support for the practice, and therefore, the dissemination of knowledge is also largely facilitated informally. Informal support is provided to non-academic actors in Slovakia also in the case of the production of products or materials (4.1% cooperated formally, 3.7% informally), provision of unique technical equipment of the university (9.1% formal, 6.8% informally) or creation of copyright works (16.4% formal, 7.9% informal). Given the unfinished policies, systems of control of academic activities or support tools at many Slovak universities, a significant share of cooperation with practice is, thus, facilitated informally.
An informal transfer is more preferred by men than by women (44% of men and 34% of women in the sample cooperated with external partners using informal channels). At the same time, it appears that the older the researcher is, the more experiences they have and the more they keep a richer network of partners, the more informal relationships they create (36.46% of doctors, 69% of associate professors and 56.82% of professors used informal transfer channels). It is interesting that only 32% of the total number of respondents in the sample who declared that took part in academic engagement utilized both formal and informal knowledge dissemination channels. This result could lead to the formulation of the hypothesis that formal and informal academic engagement can potentially exclude each other.
We found a certain level of informal academic engagement of Slovak researchers in the application sphere. Based on the supplementary information obtained from the presented survey, we note that the universities in Slovakia are not sufficiently trying to protect knowledge produced by individual researchers, to be transferred into the application sphere formally. The majority of researchers in the survey agree that in conditions of the given university, they are allowed to have side businesses, counselling and research activities in an external environment to a relatively unlimited extent. We recorded that 13.92% of researchers from our sample have a private business while working at the university. Other maintained ties can be also a result of the previous job of researchers in other sectors. Up to 38.53% of researchers in the sample worked in the private sector entities in the past, 32.47% worked in the state administration or self-government, 25.52% worked in non-governmental organisations, 16.37% provide services within scientific park, 3.61% within a business incubator and 3.61% of responded researchers were engaged in industrial unions. The answers to the open-ended questions suggest that many researchers often continue to work for actors in other sectors besides the university.
Figure 3 represents the average scores for the expected benefits from academic engagement identified by the respondents in our sample. In view of the fact that the majority of creative jobs at universities in Slovakia have a mixed scientific-pedagogical character, the most important expectations of cooperation with practice are in the form of non-financial benefits. The highest average significance was recorded in the case of enrichment of the teaching process with practical examples and understanding of the real problems of the application sphere (average importance score 2.75). This is also logically linked to the need to strategically build long-term relationships with key stakeholders (average importance 2.6). Researchers not only need to get inputs into their teaching or scientific activities but often want to test hypothesises in the “real world”. Thus, verification of their own scientific results outside the academic sphere reached a still relatively high average score of 2.54.
Expectations of financial profit (whether for themselves, the workplace or the university) gained an average significance of 2.07. Lower scores for financial benefits can be linked to low expectations of personal profit. The results from a different section of our survey, focusing on perceived barriers to academic engagement in Slovakia showed that the majority of surveyed researchers consider personal share of profit from academic engagement activities as inadequate (the majority of this profit is consumed by a university, faculty or department). We would like to compare the average importance of getting financial benefits from cooperation with external actors in the case of researchers from natural/technical and social sciences. While in life and technology sciences, the motivation in the form of profit is observed to a greater extent (average importance 2.43), academics falling under the social sciences rally on non-financial benefits to a greater extent (average importance 1.66).
In order to investigate barriers to academic engagement development, we decided to provide the survey respondents with the opportunity to express their specific attitudes concerning perceived barriers to the development of formal academic engagement (contract-based) through open questions in our questionnaire. We come out from an assumption that the understanding of the barriers to formal cooperation with the application sphere can provide us with a better understanding of why informal cooperation appeared in the case of such a proportion of academics. The answers were processed by the open coding method and in
Table 2, we present the repeatedly expressed perceived barriers with an indication of how many respondents mentioned them.
At the level of individual academics, it is mainly the lack of time that hampers the development of academic engagement. Academics in Slovak conditions must teach, lead final theses, carry out research, solve multiple research projects of different nature at once (in order to cover lack of financial resources in the department), execute administrative operations connected with research projects, undergo motilities, build networks and solve projects in the application sphere, having a low level of administrative, managerial, legal or economic support from the side of the university. Due to these facts, the respondents state that the academic engagement activities take place mainly in “free time”. In the case of formal academic engagement via counselling, contractual research and equivalent channels, academics do not feel to be adequately evaluated for this effort “beyond basic responsibilities” from the financial perspective, the perspective of impact on personal growth or from the perspective of recognition of the department in the respective university.
At the level of university management and university-level processes, respondents of the survey state, in several cases, that their university lacks an effective model for staff remuneration for academic engagement and the development of links to the application sphere. As we already indicated, in conditions of several Slovak public universities, academics feel that they are getting a low level of administrative support when organising formal cooperation activities with external partners. It was also stated that universities are, due to the length of contract preparation and multiple levels of contract approval, considerably slower partners for the application sphere than private research institutions and considerably more expensive.
The state policy level of barriers perceived by the responded researchers is mainly from areas of organisation of the public subsidy-based system of financing of higher education in the country and accreditation criteria for evaluation of the university performance. The methodology of the breakdown of state subsidies for higher education is considered by many respondents as overcomplicated and too focused on the number of students admitted to study at a given university. In 2019, there was just a little space to push up state subsidies for a university by academic engagement activities or even by the formal transfer of knowledge via technology licensing or a spin-off establishment. The accreditation (cyclic evaluation of university performance) process in Slovak’s higher-education sector is, in recent years, strongly pushing researchers to invest the majority of their time in efforts to publish scientific articles in foreign journals over efforts towards solving domestic problems.
4.2. Model Specification
At this point, we will move towards our quantitative analysis of determinants influencing the generation of interpersonal linkages between researchers and enterprises. We will work with other not yet presented data obtained from our questionnaire survey for modelling addressed relationships.
First, we would like to briefly describe our explanatory variables. From the institutional factors, the scientific field is a binary variable expressing whether the respondent is a member of a scientific discipline in the field of natural and technical sciences or social sciences. According to several authors, the applicability of academic research is an important prerequisite for the emergence of interpersonal links between researchers and actors of other sectors. Therefore, we have created a binary variable applied/basic research which indicates whether the researcher is mainly focused on basic or applied research. Of the 776 respondents, 8.76% are focused exclusively on applied research, while 40.98% of respondents declared a “predominant” focus on applied research. Purely basic research was carried out by 12.11% of academics in our sample and 38.14% of the respondents focus on basic research predominantly. The relationship between the availability of TLO at universities and a researcher’s decision to cooperate with the application sphere is evaluated using dummy variables expressing whether university institutionalized support is in the form of university TLO or not.
Within the productivity category, the impact of the researcher’s overload, in terms of the level of productivity on building links with the application sphere, is examined. The A-publication variable expresses the number of A-category publications which includes, in particular, the publication of monographs by foreign publishers and contributions in journals impacted in the Web of Science and Scopus. The level of academics’ overload from a pedagogical perspective will be measured by the average number of hours taught per semester in 2018. Only 4.12% of respondents taught zero hours per week in 2018 (purely carrying out research), 12.37% of respondents taught 1–5 h, 35.95% taught 5–10 h, 43.43% taught 10–20 h and 3.87% of respondents in the obtained sample taught more than 20 h per week (a full-time creative employee of university in Slovakia should teach 10 h). Experience and productivity in the field of commercialization of knowledge is expressed by the variable patents (total number in entire career). The binary variable motilities express whether the academic has completed mobility within the academic or private sector in the last 3 years. As PhD students can contribute to lowering the overload of research, we formulate variable PhD students that express a number of PhD students led by an associated professor or professor.
Among the access to resources and previous experience-related factors, first, we investigate the relationship between the availability of the state or private R&D grants on the emergence of observed interpersonal linkages of researchers. We also formulate variable RD infrastructure and experiences of the department with academic engagement and commercialization (liqueur scale—own attitude of the researcher) that will test the relationship between the quality of R&D and the poll of experiences and know-how on the level of institution and academic engagement.
The last section—engagement in the application sphere—contains two variables, the average number of hours invested in communication with actors in the application sphere per month and the variable business that express whether researchers have their own business outside of the academic environment.
We also formulate two controls—sex and experiences. Variable experiences express the length of the academic’s career in the higher education sector; therefore, it serves as an indicator of seniority.
4.4. Results of Analysis
In this chapter, we are going to interpret the results of the conducted analysis based on the estimations of the described logit model. First, as far as controls are concerned, only the academic’s sex influences whether or not they will be engaged in the application sphere. As we can see in
Table 6, if the researcher is male, there is a 1.58 times higher probability that he will cooperate with an entity outside of the academic sector. The model has further shown that the length of an academic career does not affect the probability of a researcher’s participation in academic engagement activities.
Concerning the observed institutional determinants, the probability of a researcher’s interest to collaborate with practice does not depend on the scientific field, respective of whether academic research focus falls under life and technical or social sciences. However, we have found a positive impact on the nature of academic research. If the researcher focuses purely or predominantly on applied research, there is up to a 2.21 times higher probability that he will generate links with actors of the application sphere; thus, we accept Hypothesis 1. We were curious about the results for the availability of TLO at universities, as more than half of Slovak public universities have not established such an institutional unit yet. Several of the existing academic TLOs show fast and positive results from their initial activities, but most of them can be considered as TLOs in seed phase. Several of them provide administrative support also in cases of contract research or provision of services mainly for private sector entities. However, in line with literature, we still found no impact of TLOs on the emergence of cases of academic engagement; thus, we accept Hypothesis 2.
We found no evidence of the relationship between the majority of productivity indicators and the emergence of cases of academic engagement in Slovak conditions. Thus, we must reject both Hypotheses 3 and 4. The experiences and time investments in publishing high-quality publications, testing and registering intellectual property and the completion of motilities are factors which could be, on the one hand, understood as factors of quality of research of surveyed academics but, on the other hand, as the level of researcher’s overload in time investments to activities different from the academic engagement. However, the reality that we found no evidence of teaching overload’s impact on cooperation with external actors can be considered striking, as respondents of the survey presented this factor as a barrier to academic engagement in open questions. However, this can be explained by the fact that the declared impact of researchers’ workload could not be felt due to a certain volume of “superheroes” among academics who manage to facilitate cooperation with the application sphere even outside working hours. The positive influence of PhD students, in turn, reflects the character of PhD studies in Slovakia. The PhD students are expected to “be a hand” for thesis supervisors, and thus, execute part of the supervisor’s responsibilities (teach for him, work on publications, scientific projects, etc.) and reduce their overload.
Within the “access to resources and previous experiences” group of factors, we found evidence of a positive impact of experiences of the department on the emergence of links between academic and non-academic actors. Results of the experiences of the department point to the fact that an accumulation of experiences by colleagues can help to facilitate the researcher’s intention to build links and cooperate with external actors. We accept Hypothesis 5, as the availability of both public and also private R&D grants increases the likelihood that the academic will cooperate with the actor of the application sphere. At least in the case of contractual (formal) cooperation, if the research is funded from private sources, the research results flow primarily to the research donor. Therefore, there is, to some extent, a relationship of conditionality in a case, but this does not apply to informal cooperation via selected transfer channels. However, it is more interesting that the availability of state research grants increases the likelihood that the academic will cooperate with external actors to a higher extent—2.23 times. These grants provide the researcher with the opportunity to decide how to disseminate his research results to a certain extent. Considering the proportion of researchers that received financing for their research via state grants (75.26% of respondents), academic research in Slovakia is highly dependent on national sources of funding which was also reflected in the results for this variable.
We found a positive impact of networking factors on the emergence of observed cooperative linkages. The respondents were asked to estimate the number of hours invested in keeping communication with actors in the application sphere. It was found to be the determinant slightly increasing the probability that a collaborative relationship between the researcher and the external partner will emerge. As we already stated in the previous chapters, the evolving system of support for the transfer of knowledge into the application sphere under the conditions of some universities has led to the creation of a tradition of “tolerance” of academics’ own business overlapping with their research and development at the university. We found that in the case of academics that have their own business, the probability of cooperation with actors of the application sphere within the academic activities is 4.29 times higher. We can hypothesize that academics who have their own businesses in addition to university jobs facilitate a significant part of informal collaboration between the academic sector and other sectors. Thus, we accept Hypothesis 6.