dc.description.abstract | In a national innovation system, science and technology are the two most important sources of innovation capacity. The interconnections and coordination between government, industry, and universities are the main factors in promoting the production, transfer, application, industrialization, and improvement of knowledge. This thesis begins with the relationships between resources investment, academic capacity, and innovation quality, conducting three studies to discuss some key points relatively neglected in the literature related to innovation systems, in order to enrich the understanding of the entire linkage mechanism.
The first study explores the relationship between research output and economic productivity. Unlike previous studies, this paper takes into consideration the time-series features of variables and the time-lagged relationships between one another in order to more meticulously discuss the relationship between research output and economic productivity. The empirical results for 25 countries between 1982 and 2007, for Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Japan, and other Asian countries, when the GDP and the number of paper publications both exhibit mutual causality, indicate that industrial developments are generally leading science and technology policies, and that scientific and technological developments will also enhance industrial processes and productivity. Wealthier Western countries have relative advantages in concentrating on the fields of medicine, life sciences, natural sciences, and other fields far away from industrial applications and the majority of them do not exhibit a situation where research output impacts economic output.
The second study explores the relationship between academic research resources and academic quality. This thesis adopts a paper’s relative citation impact as an indicator of its academic quality, which is unlike the quantitative indicator of the number of paper publications commonly used in previous studies. This paper adopts the cross-country empirical results of ordered probit and panel data models to show that, regardless of whether the field is “science” or “social science” or an entire field, the academic research and development (R&D) resources available have a significantly positive impact on academic quality and that resources investments have cumulative effects and delayed effects. There are differences in the performance of academic quality in Asian and non-Asian countries. These findings are in line with those of past studies, which consider that there are inconsistent scientific structures among the different country groups.
The third study explores the correlation between patent quality and national academic quality. This thesis adopts the average number of forward citations of a patent as a measurable indicator of patent quality and conducts discussions from the perspectives of national academic quality, industry–academia linkages in countries, science and technology linkages (scientific knowledge flows), technology and technology linkages (technological knowledge flows), etc. As indicated by cross-country empirical results for 33 countries from 1995 to 2012, the national academic quality is an important variable impacting national patent quality, having significant positive benefits on patent quality. When the levels of industry–academia linkages and technology linkages (i.e., the number of backward citations) of a country are higher, it will also prompt better patent quality. However, for the science linkage aspect of indicators related to referencing non-patent literature, there are negative albeit insignificant impacts. Since a patent referencing a large number of scientific papers likely contains knowledge with more complexity and originality, it may not be easy to generalize the applications of this knowledge. In addition, factors like differences between fields and the attributes of the patentee may also cause differences in referencing behavior. | en_US |