A network perspective of academia-industry nanotechnology collaboration: A comparison of Canada and the United States

Novelty of nanotechnology and its invaluable application in almost all fields makes innovation in this sector an interest for many countries, including Canada and the United States. The collaboration between academia and industry is considered to be particularly beneficial in nanotechnology, as it is an emerging field where the science is interdisciplinary and applications are far and wide. This paper compares the nanotechnology innovation diffusion and knowledge transfer in Canada and the United States. In addition, it investigates the interaction between universities and industry in these countries and analyzes their network characteristics to highlight the distinct roles that academic and industrial researchers play in the collaboration network. The collaboration patterns are studied through co-authorship and co-inventorship data using social network analysis. The results show that the American nanotechnology subnetwork involves more collaboration, and is more centralized than the Canadian one. Moreover, in the aforesaid countries it was found that both academic researchers collaborating strictly within academia and industrial researchers working solely among themselves occupy more clustered but less central network positions. Consequently, no matter how productive or innovative these researchers are, their role in knowledge transmission is quite limited, while the researchers who bridge the two sectors through collaborations of university-industry nature are critical to the knowledge transfer through the network.