New organisational behaviour of public research institutions: lessons learned from Italian case study

Abstract

Shrinking public research unit budgets and reform of science sector have been changing organisational behaviour of research institutions. Nowadays, public research institutes in some countries (such as Italy, Germany, Australia, Norway and so on) tend to operate as quasi-business firms or research laboratories market-oriented with many characteristics of the business firm, except for the profit motive, and researchers focus their scientific activity on applied research and consultancy to firms, rather than basic research. In addition, reforming based on large sizes of labs is not a sustainable research policy strategy to increase their efficiency if there is the decline of public funds in the public research sector.