During the governments of Nestor Kirchner and Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in Argentina, between 2003 and 2015, the State renewed its role in the orientation of economic and social development, assigning a predominant place to the Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) policies. This included the creation of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation in 2007 and the development of two strategic plans for this sector: the “Plan Estratégico Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Bicentenario (2006-2010)” and the “Argentina Innovadora 2020: Plan Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (2011-2015)”. These policies aimed, among other objectives, to promote the collaboration between universities and private enterprises.
In fact, the name of the established Ministry provides a clear orientation towards the developments of those links. Furthermore, one of its three main policy guidelines is the creation of “actions aiming to link the academic and productive systems generating public-private consortiums” (own translation). The strategic plans increased the role of the National Agency for Scientific and Technological Promotion (ANPCyT, by its Spanish acronym). The ANPCyT promotes university-industry collaborations by four different government funds distributed by open calls for project proposals (FonCyT, FonTar, FONARSEC and FonSoft). Between 2009 and 2015 the number of projects funded by the ANPCyT grew from 1 710 to 2 724, with a 140% of increase, in real terms, in the total allocation of funds.
In this presentation, we aim to evaluate the effects of these bundle of policies in Argentina’s flagship and biggest university in terms of budget, students and faculty, the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). The UBA ranked second among Latin American institutions in the 2017 Shanghai World Universities Ranking, and first according to the 2018’s QS World Universities Ranking, occupying the 75th position worldwide.
Considering the internal heterogeneity and complexities of the UBA, we focus on a globally privileged domain for university-industry collaborations: the biopharmaceutical. We must have in mind, thus, that results cannot be automatically applied to the experience of the whole UBA. In the UBA’s Pharmacy and Biochemistry Faculty (PBF) the orientation of national Science, Technology and Innovation policies encouraged the authorities to promote further links with private enterprises, as can be seen in its annual reports and in its 2014-2018 Strategic Plan.
In this context, what were the impacts of the university-industry collaboration policies on the PBF’s actual collaborations? In order to answer this question, we will analyze the PBF’s links with private enterprises by looking at the complete detailed list of their agreements with third parties between 1997 and 2013 (period chosen considering data availability) provided by its Technology Transfer Sub-Secretariat. We consider whether the type and quantity of links have changed since the implementation of the mentioned policies. Furthermore, since there is not significant history of patenting in the PBF, we also analyze collaborations with industry by performing a bibliometric analysis of the evolution of the UBA’s co-publications with enterprises in the Pharmacy domain using Web of Science database and Cortext Manager Platform. This analysis is complemented by a semantic analysis of the evolution of research themes in order to acknowledge if researchers have adopted their research towards the government’s strategic research orientations which were defined considering Argentina’s industrial needs.
These analyses are complemented with in-depth interviews to researchers that were in charge of technology transfer agreements with private enterprises during the chosen period. Results show that even if the quantity of collaborations has been increasing, there was no significant transformation in the type of links, which have been and continue to be mainly technical assistances during the whole period. The bibliometric analysis of co-publications reinforces our main conclusion: the FBP is further collaborating with industry only to do mainly routine activities but there does not seem to be any change in terms of joint research projects that may lead to scientific discoveries nor to innovations. In terms of publications’ topics, they tend to follow the international agenda, which sometimes coincides with Argentina’s strategic research orientations.
The obtained results lead us to further discuss on the effects of the applied policies for academic research thinking of possible alternative policies for public science production in Argentina.