Ekaterina Artamkina
Title: 'Cooperation between domestic universities and local companies: The case of Russian chemical company “Pigment”'
Supervisor: Dr. Tarmo Kalvet
Opponent: Dr.Erkki Karo
Defense: 9 June 2015
Abstract: The goal of this paper is to determine types of knowledge transfers and obstacles to effective institutional cooperation between universities and the science-based industries in Russia. The research is based on the theoretical approaches of Schartinger (2002); Serrano-Bedia (2009), Salter (2009) to evaluate the cooperation from the position of the industry and science. The empirical studies include the analytical findings from surveys in the field of university-industry cooperation and proceedings of the interviews with representatives from the Russian chemical company “Pigment”. This research explains the reasons obstacles to the cooperation are: difference in incentive systems, conflicts about evaluation of the intellectual property (IP), and availability of foreign knowledge from developed countries. The key findings are the Russian chemical companies are not much interested in basic research from domestic Universities; they rely on the foreign experimental development and find it a more effective a way of cost-quality. Chemical industries develop internal R&D capabilities in order to refine foreign knowledge and implement it to current production. Domestic Universities are not interested much in revision of foreign R&D and have low absorptive capacity for it.
Keywords: knowledge transfers, sectoral patterns, university-industry cooperation, differences in incentives, foreign substitutions
