Collaboration and knowledge networks: A framework on analyzing evolution of university-industry collaborative innovation

Collaborations of universities and firms provide a key pathway for innovation. In recent years, interactions between the two communities have been reshaped with much higher complexity due to the enhanced ability of creating, disseminating and exchanging knowledge in big data era. This short paper aims to improve the framework of modeling interactions in University-Industry collaboration by building both participant cooperation network and knowledge network for re-recognizing the patterns, characteristics and evolution trend of university-industry collaborative innovation. The proposed framework integrates techniques of bibliometrics, complex network analysis, and text mining to reveal the evolution of both participants interactions and their collaborative knowledge structure in a two-layers multiplex network. Network analytic metrics are selected to provide comprehensive insight on structural properties and characteristics. Finally, the industry of information and communications technology (ICT) is selected to provide an empirical case study to examine the feasibility of the framework.