Spin-off companies are generally considered a promising vehicle for developing academic knowledge into products that are ready for the market. In this paper the authors explore under what circumstances spin-off companies can serve as a source of knowledge for the research organization from which they originate. The paper brings together literature…

Traditionally, European doctoral education has principally taken place within the binary relationship of professors and their doctoral students according to the "apprenticeship model." However, in the last one to two decades, this model has been questioned. Governments and higher education institutions (HEIs) reform doctoral education by…

This article aims at a better understanding of the role played by multilingualism and language in general in the process of scientific knowledge construction. By analysing various cases of multilingual communication in different universities and subjects (marketing, physics, law), we propose to focus on two parameters: the language regime and the…

This article analyses some typical consequences of a specific research policy on experimental research in biology. The policy is conducted by a national funding agency--the Swiss National Science Foundation--through a particular programme, the "National Centres of Competence in Research" which is designed to promote both "scientific…