ABSTRACT
The last decade has seen an enormous increase in both policy and academic interest in the flows of knowledge between individuals, firms and institutions such as universities and government research labs and the role of such knowledge flows in innovation. The third edition of the Oslo Manual, for example, includes a separate chapter on the role of ‘linkages’ in innovation and how to measure linkages in innovation surveys. European policy at both the supra-national and national levels includes a diverse range of programmes to encourage knowledge flows, particularly between firms and the publicly-funded research infrastructure. This is based on a long-standing belief in a systematic failure of European firms to commercialize discoveries made by public universities and research institutes (European Commission [EC] 2001), although the causes of such a failure is the subject of a lively debate (Dosi et al. 2005).
