The Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations at the Country Level, and Its Dynamic Evolution under the Pressures of Globalization

TL;DR

This study examines how globalization impacts the interactions among universities, industry, and government at the country level, revealing a decline in their collaborative intensity over time, especially in developed nations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of the Triple Helix dynamics using mutual information from Web of Science data, comparing developed and developing countries over time.

Findings

Triple-Helix interactions decrease over time.

Globalization erodes local university-industry-government relations.

Developed countries experience more pronounced effects.

Abstract

Using data from the Web of Science (WoS), we analyze the mutual information among university, industrial, and governmental addresses (U-I-G) at the country level for a number of countries. The dynamic evolution of the Triple Helix can thus be compared among developed and developing nations in terms of cross-sectorial co-authorship relations. The results show that the Triple-Helix interactions among the three subsystems U-I-G become less intensive over time, but unequally for different countries. We suggest that globalization erodes local Triple-Helix relations and thus can be expected to increase differentiation in national systems since the mid-1990s. This effect of globalization is more pronounced in developed countries than in developing ones. In the dynamic analysis, we focus on a more detailed comparison between China and the USA. The Chinese Academy of the (Social) Sciences changes increasingly from a public research institute to an academic one, and this has a measurable effect on China's position in the globalization.