The extent to which patent-related indicators are relevant for evaluating the excellence of knowledge-generating institutions is considered.Although patent counts are now used more frequently for this purpose in the United States, this approach needs alteration in order to be applied in the...

Research in the area of innovation has pointed out the relevance of conceiving innovation as processes in which a multitude of actors and a variety of interactions play a role. Integrative notions like (national) innovations systems, (techno-scientific) networks, or the triple helix metaphor,...