Abstract

The innovation process seems to be resources, path and rules dependent. And the more farsighted policymakers are focusing on the exchanges that occur between research and industry, which are rendered more efficient by the imposition of governance structures that achieve synergies at the local level. An ongoing research into the major sources of public and publicprivate support for research and technology transfer in some of Europe's most developed regions demonstrate that the university-industry-public administration channel is very important. Exist a gap (often termed "death valley") within the sequence from research to market, where intervention (including public) might be justified to act as an interface to support interaction. The aim of this paper is to investigate the infrastructures that exist to bridge between science and industry in developed European regions and how they perform. In many regions there are university-industry linkages that are important for mediating between parties and for the transfer of codified and tacit knowledge. Science-industry technology platforms have been created to integrate research findings in business environments and involve public-private groupings with universities, other research organizations, foundations, firms of all sizes and public institutions. We study the barriers to effective knowledge transfer and suggest some solutions and examples of good practice for promoting knowledge transfer.