Instituten i innovationssystemet

Project leader: Professor Sverker Sörlin (PI)
Assistant project leader: Katarina Larsen
Participants from the Division: Sverker Sörlin, Katarina Larsen, Ingemar Pettersson, Karl Bruno , Dzamila Bienkowska, Patricia Bergström Phumpiu Chang
Funding Agency: Vinnova
Period 2007–2012

Specialized industrially-oriented research institutes are an important element in innovation systems world wide. In an international perspective the Swedish research institute sector is small. As a share of the total research spending they hold less than two percent and their support from public sources corresponds to a mere three percent of government R&D spending. It is an open question what the effects of the small institute sector have been for the Swedish innovation system. However, political signals indicate there is a reorientation of policy under way to give industrially motivated research a stronger profile and thereby institutes a more significant role.

In this project an interdisciplinary group of researchers undertake to analyse the complex roles and niches that institutes occupy in the “ecology” of innovation systems. Studies will focus on, e.g.:
• Development, function, and performance of institutes – individually and collectively
• Industrial and technological clusters where institutes cooperate with firms
• Science clusters where institutes cooperate with universities and colleges
• Institute labs as interdisciplinary R&D milieux
• The institute « project culture » – networks, agreements, publishing cultures, Intellectual Property Rights management, etcetera
• Changes in Sweden’s official policy towards research institutes since 1940
• Aggregate international comparative analysis