Effect of international collaboration on knowledge flow within an innovation system: a Triple Helix approach

Abstract

Research papers that studied the Triple Helix in relation to international co-authorship considered international collaboration as the fourth element of the system. This paper suggests considering three levels of study to assess the effect of international collaboration on an innovation system: the domestic one, the foreign one and the global one. The mutual information and the transmission power are used as indicators. Bibliographic data of South Korea and the West African region for a 10-year period (2001–2010) were downloaded and imported to a bibliographic software application. Searches are run to determine the Triple Helix actors and their bi- or trilateral collaboration contributions per considered area, year and level. Then, the mutual information and the transmission power were computed. Results show that at the domestic level, the South Korean innovation system is more integrated, whereas the West African one is less integrated than that of their partners. Results also show that international collaboration has strengthened knowledge sharing at the domestic level for both South Korea and West Africa, but to a different extent; in other words, the two areas have benefited from international collaboration in terms of knowledge flow.