With the emergence of the knowledge based economy, universities have undertaken a new 'entrepreneurial' role whereby they can contribute directly to economic development through the commercialisation of knowledge residing within universities. However, to ensure technologies are successfully transferred from universities to industry, there is a need to understand the knowledge processes between multiple stakeholders and how they can be managed. Absorptive capacity has emerged as an important construct for understanding complex knowledge exchanges between entities. Therefore, this thesis focuses on an in-depth exploration of the knowledge processes within university technology transfer through an absorptive capacity lens. The research undertook an exploratory qualitative study with the aim of inductively building theory in an under-researched area. The data collection methods employed were in-depth interviews with multiple stakeholders, observation and document analysis. The findings of this study resulted in the identification of 6 key themes, namely, human factors, stakeholder roles, power relationships, knowledge source, organisational factors and external influences which all need to be considered to improve university technology transfer effectiveness. Each of these themes and corresponding subthemes were found to have varying impact on the sharing, transfer, acquisition, absorption and exploitation of knowledge. Thus, stressing the importance of strategically managing the knowledge exchanges and flows that take place between university technology transfer stakeholders so that knowledge can be leveraged to aid university technology transfer success. As a result of the findings, a conceptual absorptive capacity based framework was developed respresenting the complex knowledge processes involved in university technology commercialisation, thus aiding theoretical development. In addition, practical recommendations are made which should aid future university technology transfer success.

One particular idea in the science and technology policymaking arena is to emphasise the role of universities in latecomer countries' catching-up strategies through 'early entry' in the development of emerging technologies. The thesis explores the extent to which universities in latecomer countries could actually assume such a role. The thesis decided to tackle this challenge by Integrating the theoretical ideas of Perez and Soete (1988) with more recent ideas on systems of innovation. The thesis has used a technological system framework to analyse the role of universities. This framework is used to examine the contribution of universities to the development of a set of system functions that are essential during the introduction phase of the technology's life cycle.

The aim of this research is to investigate the role of the governmental technological policy of international transferring technology in developing countries with particular focus on Kuwait. It is also an endeavour to propose a framework for the public sector for formulating technology development strategy favourable for technology transfer for developing countries.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has profoundly influenced social transformation today, of which economic transformation, including related urban spatial restructuring, has become a key feature. This research aims to examine the policymaking and implementation processes in order to investigate the political initiatives of China’s developing information economy. Beijing has been taken as a specific case study to look in depth at the development processes. The research focuses on ‘government’ and ‘enterprise’ as the two major agents playing strategic roles in driving China’s information economy development. In the research study, Manuel Castells’ two theoretical approaches, namely ‘informational economy’ and ‘space of flows’, are adopted as the theoretical framework, because they are most relevant to China’s distinctive national situation. For the research work, three questions are addressed. 1). what kind of information economy is being supported in China and why? 2). how and how well is the information economy developed in Beijing? 3). what are the major problems and difficulties challenging this development?’ In my fieldwork, documentary analysis and in-depth qualitative interviewing are adopted as the two research methods. The research found that owing to China’s incomplete industrialization, the Chinese government has created a new way to promote China’s information economy called ‘neo-industrialization’ path. This means that through promoting the use and development of ICTs, the processes of informatization and industrialization can be integrated into one process, so that a 'leap-forward' of the national economy will be realized. In the process, the city of Beijing has been experiencing an unprecedented spatial restructuring, through which it is believed that the capital city of China is becoming a more functionalized ‘digital city’ in the 21st century.

This is claimed to be an era of knowledge-based economies; the knowledge developed in National Innovation Systems (NISs) is widely thought to have become crucial to science and technology development in leading economies. Most scholars admit the NIS is a complex, dynamic and non-linear system. In order to enhance understanding of the structure and process of the NIS as well as the level and the rate of flows within an NIS, a system dynamics approach and computer simulations are applied in this research. This research will therefore centre on an attempt to develop a mathematical model of the national innovation system of Taiwan, particularly with regard to its Integrated Circuit (IC) industry. Various definitions and models of an NIS have been proposed from different points of view (e.g. Freeman, 1987; Lundvall, 1992; Nelson, 1993; Patel and Pavitt, 1994; Metcalfe, 1995; Smith, 1996; OECD, 1997; Gregersen et al., 1997; Vanichseni, 1998). The approach taken here is additionally based on the viewpoint of System Dynamics to describe its complex status. Therefore, the main aim of this research is to combine related theories/practices of innovation systems and system dynamics in order to understand both the dynamic relations and the innovative performance among the structural elements (actors) of Taiwan's IC industry. One objective is to increase our insight into the dynamics of national systems of innovation by means of computer modelling and formulating research questions for future research. Another objective is to create scenarios to verify the behaviour of the institutions under investigation by simulation, and to assess possible outcomes in those varying scenarios. By means of questionnaire/in-depth interviews and SD model simulation, as cross-comparisons between them, the thesis aims to increase our insight into the dynamic processes of the Taiwanese IC industry's systems of innovation and our understanding of the interdependence and interaction among the capital flow, human resource flow, knowledge & technology flow and product flow in the NIS. In addition, a comparison of innovation commercialization in Taiwan's IC industry under the different policy tests and scenario tests is undertaken. These simulations show that single policies are relatively ineffective and that innovation performance requires combining a range of policies and capabilities.

The context for this research is the influence of commercialisation in UK higher education. The study presents an ethnographic account and analysis of the experiences of a group of individuals involved with a recently formed university spinout company in the UK. The research was conducted over a two year period and data were collected from a range of sources including participant-observation, semi-structured interviews and written material. Conceptual constructs emerged from both inductive and deductive processes: data were examined as they surfaced and themes drawn out; these themes were then explored further in the field. Firstly, the account combines ethnographic and auto-ethnographic approaches in describing the significance of the commercialisation project to the individual employee. Participants' experiences of the spinout company are categorised into four areas of significance: Change, Challenge, Culture and Confusion (The Four Cs'). A typology is developed which illustrates the spread of the data in relation to the degree of distance between the actor and the event. Secondly, the thesis considers environmental factors influencing the individual experience. The spinout company project is contextualised in a multi-faceted 'web of influence' combining three distinct lenses through which the case may be viewed: the macro-, meso- and micro-levels. This tiered approach to the analysis considers the influences of broader social and economic developments on individual sense-making. The study critiques some key assumptions about commercialisation which are prevalent in the higher education sector and demonstrates ways in which changing organisational directions affect individual lives. It problematises this impact in terms of personal and professional dilemmas and proposes a renegotiation of professional and academic identities as role boundaries converge. It concludes with consideration of implications for current management practice in universities and suggestions for further research.

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I have had an interest in "technology transfer" for many years, and have been researching and publishing work related to this domain for the last fifteen. At the present time these include approximately 46 refereed papers, 22 of which are book chapters or journal articles; the others are included in international conference proceedings - mainly those of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). IFIP is a worldwide organisation formed in 1960 following the first World Computer Congress in Paris in 1959, operating under the auspices of UNESCO 1 I have co-edited 2 books on technology transfer, one with the late Enid Mumford and others in 19972 , and the other more recently in the spring of 2007 3 In 1993 I was a founding member of IFIP Working Group 8.6 whose interests lie in the transfer and diffusion of information technology, and I am one of only two members of this group to have contributed to and attended every event that the group has been engaged in. In 2006 I was elected Secretary on the steering committee of the group. I am also a member of IFIP 8.2 - a related group concerned with the interaction of information technology and the organisation, and I am a founding member of the UKAIS (UK Academy of Information Systems), and the IRIS Association (Information Systems Research in Scandinavia). Additionally I am a member of the British Computer Society (BCS), and the BCS special interest group (SIG) on Information Systems Methodologies, for which I am also that group's current Secretary. My main research interest lies in theoretical accounts of technology transfer, the most dominant of these being diffusion theory (Rogers, 1962, 1995) or variants upon this (JAM for example), and my early papers are distinctly Rogerian in tone. However around 1993 I discovered Actor-Network Theory (ANT)4 , and I began to question the philosophical basis upon which diffusion theory rests. There are problems with diffusionist thinking that are never satisfactorily addressed (by diffusionists), such as for example 'pro-innovation bias' - that is the propensity to attribute blame to those who 'ought' to have adopted an innovation when they have not done so, describing this failure to adopt pejoratively using terms such as 'laggards' and 'resistors' etc. They never actually question the innovation itself, assuming this to be obvious, desirable, natural and inevitable. There are a number of other serious problems with diffusion theory, such as the extreme deterministic nature of the theory, so much indeed that its proponents are often tempted to believe they can predict implementation outcomes, sometimes astonishingly, using algebraic formulations to support their assertions, as if human beings were molecules of water in a beaker about to receive a few drops of dye in Brownian Motion experiment! A number of the contributions herein deal with these and (many) other problems with diffusion in some detail, but it is one thing to criticise diffusion, it is quite another to answer at least one inevitable and far more interesting question which I have been engaged with for the last 5 or 6 years, namely, if diffusion theory really is so obviously 'flawed', then how, or why has it come to be as dominant across the cultural institutions of the western world as it so clearly has?5 This submission addresses precisely this question through ten contributions that show the evolution of my own thinking on these and other matters, starting with a contribution that could easily be described as a classical 'diffusionist' paper. This presents a factor-based analysis - typical of diffusionist approaches - to describe the failure of a local authority to adopt a CASE tool for the development of software artefacts. It also presumes to 'predict' that if these factors had been better accounted for, then success rather than failure might instead have been the outcome. The final contribution answers (or at least goes some way toward answering) directly the question above. The results of the explorations chronicled in this final contribution are perhaps surprising and controversial. Put simply, diffusionism represents a mindset that has been derived from five hundred years of colonial exploitation by a few western European countries and is deeply embedded in the collective psyches of western Europeans. 6 Evidence can be found in the relationships between (for example) traditional IT specialists and users through the attitudes and arguments used between these respective groups. 7 These mirror precisely the same attitudes and arguments that were used to justify colonialist ambition and European expansionism in the past. The worldviews reflected in the first and last contributions described briefly above, represent extreme contrasts. The eight additional contributions between these, map the journey between them over a period of a decade-and-a-half. While the content of each paper has, by virtue of its publication, offered something of interest to someone, of no less interest is the journey itself from diffusion to a critique of diffusionism via emerging social theory that is embedded in this work, and reflected in the accompanying commentary.

This dissertation contributes to the empirical literature on the effects of international technology transfer on firms' productivity and employment in developing and transition countries. It combines three empirical essays which provide evidence on how participation in international activities affects firms' productivity, how it interacts with firms' absorptive capacity and how it affects firms' demand for skilled labour in 26 transition countries in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region. The first study investigates whether foreign ownership, supplying multinationals (MNEs) located in the same country, foreign direct investment (FDI) horizontal spillovers, exporting and importing are conduits of international technology transfer and their relative importance for firms in 26 transition economies in ECA region using Business Enterprise and Environment Performance Survey (BEEPS) 2002- 2005. It contributes to the literature by analyzing the impact of all main channels of international technology transfer simultaneously and by using a firm specific measure for supply linkages with MNEs, unlike previous studies that used industry level measures. The main results suggest that foreign ownership, supplying MNEs, exporting and importing are robustly associated with higher firm productivity and we cannot reject the hypothesis that these channels are equally important. The second study examines whether international technology transfer through foreign ownership, supplying MNEs, exporting and importing depends on firm and country absorptive capacity in 26 transition economies in ECA region using the BEEPS 2002 and 2005 waves. The main contributions of this paper are that it uses firm specific measures of access to foreign technology and measures of absorptive capacity (workforce education, personnel training and R&D activities) which are closely related to the concept of absorptive capacity and less prone to measurement errors than productivity gap measures used in previous studies. Our results suggest that access to foreign technology and absorptive capacity are associated with higher productivity, but, contrary to our hypothesis, there is no evidence of an interaction effect between absorptive capacity and access to foreign technology. The third study investigates how participation in international activities affects firms' demand for skilled labour and the ways in which firms respond to changes in demand for skilled labour in 26 transition economies in ECA during the period 2002-2005 using BEEPS 2002 and 2005 waves. It contributes to the literature by studying different ways in which firms respond to changes in the demand for skilled labour (hiring employees from outside the firm or training existing employees) and by studying whether there is a causal relationship between participation in international activities and demand for skilled labour. Our results suggest that firms engaged in international activities have a better educated labour force and are more likely to train their employees than domestic firms. However, this happens because firms with better skilled workforces and with formal training programmes select into participating in international activities, and not because these firms upgrade the skills of their workforces after starting to participate in international activities.