Changes on the `Borderlines' between Research and Industry following Economic Transformation in the Czech Republic

Abstract

This paper presents the results of comparative empirical research on the emergence of new institutional arrangements on what we might call the `borderlines between research and industry', in the context (especially) of radical economic liberalization in the Czech Republic. The research focused on creative links between academic and industrial research, the exploitation of research by industry, and the growth of new intermediary institutions between these two spheres. The paper analyzes the potential for such developments by looking at the institutional shaping of different sectors of the research system, in the environment of centralist regulatory practices before 1989, and their de-institutionalization following radical economic reform in the early 1990s. The latter process has had a mobilizing effect, prompting (among other things) a number of local `bottom-up' initiatives — which, in various ways, promise to enhance links between research and industry — in response to pressures on the research system. Three exemplary cases are described (from industrial, academy and university research respectively) in order to illustrate both the opportunities and the limits to such developments. It is argued in conclusion that additional, `top-down' efforts are required if this potential is to be fully realized.