Efficiency of the research and development activities of technical universities in Poland

Abstract

In the 21st century knowledge-based economy, long-term economic growth and development depend on the ability to use the knowledge and technology so as to create product, process, organisational, marketing and even social innovations. The knowledge and technology, human resources and social capital (facilitating the transfer of technology from the world of science to the economy), comprise the most important production factors today. Research and development (R&D) activities are among the diverse determinants affecting the economy’s ability to innovate. They are carried out by public technical universities. One of the tasks that these entities face is to conduct basic, industrial (applied) research and development works. Their results can then be transferred to industrial and service enterprises as novel solutions. Research and development activities of universities are financed mainly from public sources, which suggests the need to assess the efficiency of this task. This can be done with the use of various methods, e.g. the non-parametric DEA method. The purpose of the paper is to measure the efficiency of research and development activities of public technical universities in Poland with the aid of the DEA method. The fourteen universities which in the years 2015–2017 reported to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (MNiSW) were included in the study. The efficiency of the universities in filing new patent solutions and being granted patents was analysed. The results acquired indicate very low and low efficiency of most Polish technical universities. This is due both to a small number of patent applications and a small number of patents granted. In the examined period, the group of most efficient technical universities in both aspects comprised 4 to 5 universities.

Measuring the efficiency of university departments: an empirical study using data envelopment analysis and cluster analysis

“…In the literature, two types of efficiency evaluations at the university level have been extensively discussed (for example, Abbott & Doucouliagos, 2003;Kao & Hung, 2008;Sellers-Rubio, Mas-Ruiz, & Casado-Díaz, 2010;Agasisti & Wolszczak-Derlacz, 2015). The first type compares the efficiency of different universities; for example, in the last five years, such studies have included Lee and Worthington (2016), Sagarra et al (2017), Visbal-Cadavid et al (2017, Guironnet and Peypoch (2018), Klumpp (2018), Quiroga-Martinez et al (2018, Yang et al (2018), Hou et al (2019, Moreno-Gómez et al (2019), Koçak et al (2019), Shamohammadi and Oh (2019), Dumitrescu et al (2020), Łącka and Brzezicki (2020), Moncayo-Martínez et al (2020), Salas-Velasco (2020), Tran et al (2020), andZhang et al (2020). The second type of efficiency evaluation compares the efficiency of different departments within a university, such as in the studies of Sinuany-Stern et al (1994), Gander (1995), Kao and Hung (2008), Barra and Zotti (2016), Ding et al (2020), andGhasemi et al (2020).…”

The efficiency of scientific activities and technology transfer in higher education in Poland

“…Therefore, they use a two-stage network DEA model (Yang et al, 2018), in which the first stage is related to basic research and the second to technology transfer. A few authors (e.g., Wolszczak-Derlacz, 2013;Chuanyi et al, 2016;Łącka, Brzezicki, 2020) use two separate empirical models adopting other variables. Wolszczak-Derlacz (2013) separately estimated the efficiency of scientific and implementation activities of 31 public higher education institutions in Poland (mainly universities and polytechnics) in 2001-2008.…”

“…The efficiency and productivity of these systems determine the possibility of overcoming challenges, reducing barriers, and taking advantage of development opportunities in the modern economy. Poland, for several years, has been trying to make changes in the functioning of its national innovation system (Łącka, Brzezicki, 2021) and its components within the higher education sector (Łącka, Brzezicki, 2020). The goal is to increase the role of universities in the technology transfer process between science, industry and society within the so-called third (Compagnucci, Spigarelli, 2020) and even fourth mission of the university (Lucovics, Zuti, 2015).…”

Does China’s Regional Digital Economy Promote the Development of a Green Economy?

“…In terms of the literature on the green economy, current research mainly focuses on the connotation and measurement of the green economy [19][20][21]. Scholars generally use the non-parametric DEA or extended DEA model to measure the green economy, which has some defects in multi-dimensional dynamic comparison in time and space [22,23]. Moreover, existing studies tend to overlook the effect of environmental regulation on the relationship of the digital economy and the development of the green economy.…”