The role of institutions and firm characteristics in the networks of firm publications. An analysis of the Italian biotech sector through the Social Network Analysis

In this paper we analyse, through the instrument of the social network analysis, the network of co-authorships in the publications of the firms belonging to the Italian life-science biotech sector. The aim of the paper is to analyse the role of the different institutions (universities, research centres, hospitals and firms) inside such network. We try to conduct this analysis in depth, taking into consideration also the nature and characteristics of the biotech firms. We use a classification of the biotech firms according to the criteria suggested by OCED and we analyse the characteristics of the networks generated by the publications of each typology of firm, focusing the attention on the role played by the different institutions inside each of them. Therefore, crossing two dimensions of the analysis (nature of the institutions, characteristics of the firms) we try to shed new light on the architecture of the sectoral system of innovation, that may be considered a relevant part of the whole Italian national system of innovation. The analysis shows that the Italian innovation system is based on a balance among different institutions, each of them having a prevalent function. The central role is covered by the universities, particularly of the great universities in the Northern Italy, the more industrialised part of the country; their prominent role, among the different kinds of institutions, is common to all the typologies of biotech firms, with particularly strong ties with R&D biotech firms and a limited exception in the network of publications of the so-called targeted biotech firms that, being wholesaler, are more interested in collaboration with institution oriented to the “application” of biotechnologies. Research centres have an important role in bridging different institutions, as it is possible to infer from their frequent presence in large and heterogeneous networks of co-autorship. Collaboration with hospitals is less systematic, but they have a prominent role in more applied research, as it is demonstrated by the central role they have in the network of publications of the targeted firms. This analysis also shows a possible point of weakness of the Italian system of innovation, represented by the low degree of collaboration among different firms, at least on the point of view of co-autorship of scientific publication in the biotech sector