For the first time, data on individual European higher education institutions (rather than data aggregated at the country level) is used in order to examine a wide range of issues that are both theoretically challenging and relevant from policy-making and societal perspectives. The contributors...

The reasons behind the poor competitiveness of the European information technology (IT) industry vis-á-vis the US one have been discussed many times. This paper suggests that the long-term competitiveness of science-based industries is dependent on the ability of the underlying scientific base...

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are crucial to the development of the European Research Area. However, unlike in the USA, the availability of quantitative indicators for individual HEI at the European level is severely limited by several methodological issues, data availability problems and...

The subject of this article is the analysis of the Italian business R&D expenditure over the 2001-2010 period. Two main features make the Italian case interesting in international comparisons: first, the country has not been able to catch up with the average level of business R&D expenditure in...

This paper investigates how far in space university knowledge goes to breed the creation of knowledge-intensive firms (KIFs), depending on the nature (either codified or tacit) and quality of this knowledge. We consider the impact of knowledge codified in academic patents and scientific...

University rankings are the subject of a paradox: the more they are criticized by social scientists and experts on methodological grounds, the more they receive attention in policy making and the media. In this paper we attempt to give a contribution to the birth of a new generation of rankings,...

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