Research Collaboration as perceived by Top-performing Engineering Institutes of India

The purpose of this study is to understand the perception of collaboration through the lenses of academic authors of top-performing engineering institutes who are known as better collaborators, seeking to better understand the motivation, extent, perceived benefits and barriers in collaboration. The quantitative bibliometric analysis along with enquiry with authors of 10 top-performing engineering institutes was employed. The results show that national collaboration, and mainly with academic authors of same or other institution, still is a preferable choice among authors of engineering institutes. In spite of international collaboration leading more average citation, there is no significant gain seen. These scholars involve themselves in collaboration for a variety of reasons, but mainly due to getting scientific popularity among world peers or for citation benefits. Collaboration with private or government organization, although quite a few, is mainly for testing of their newly developed ideas as product or to provide consultancy. This article argues that as the share of university-industry-government research collaborations is disturbingly low, a strong congruence between knowledge capital and entrepreneurial capital is needed towards development of entrepreneurial university