Research infrastructure, networks of science and regional development – the case of oskarshamn

Abstract

Final disposal of nuclear waste is a global engineering challenge. The Swedish nuclear industry has consequently spent more than thirty years investigating the best sites and technologies for the final storage of nuclear waste. Universities have been involved as experts in this large-scale R&D activity. This has resulted in a well-documented body of knowledge for supporting relevant decision-making. Simultaneously, as a result, global research infrastructure networks have been developed and consequently more than 140 PhD theses have been produced. Eleven of these PhD holders are now full professors. Based on earlier work on research infrastructures from Lund, Hamburg, and Kiruna, see for instance Snickars, Falck (2015), we have addressed the question of the role of a technical research infrastructure in the development of the fields of engineering and natural science while simultaneously generating regional development. It has provided an opportunity to empirically study the use of research infrastructure in a specialized technology field. At the same time, this study investigates one municipality’s efforts to specialize in research without a university in the vicinity. Do networks of cooperation differ between research groups and research infrastructures? How can a region build its smart specialization on research infrastructure? How can research equipment once belonging to a company be transformed to a public research infrastructure asset? Our results indicate that research infrastructures such as the ones in Oskarshamn are powerful creators of international research networks. It is possible, although somewhat difficult in view of scattered systems for data provision, to assess their academic and societal impacts. Engineering research has its own networks of university-industry and industry-university interaction where project-based value is cogenerated dynamically. In this study, we have come some way towards empirically analyzing the networks of research cooperation between industry and university using methods of infrastructure and social network analysis.