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Subnetwork identification plays a significant role in analyzing, managing, and comprehending the structure and functions in big networks. Numerous approaches have been proposed to solve the problem of subnetwork identification as well as community detection. Most of the methods focus on detecting communities by considering node attributes, edge information, or both. This study focuses on discovering subnetworks containing researchers with similar or related areas of interest or research topics. A topic-aware subnetwork identification is essential to discover potential researchers on particular research topics and provide quality work. Thus, we propose a topic-based optimal subnetwork identification approach (TOSNet). Based on some fundamental characteristics, this paper addresses the following problems: 1)How to discover topic-based subnetworks with a vigorous collaboration intensity? 2) How to rank the discovered subnetworks and single out one optimal subnetwork? We evaluate the performance of the proposed method against baseline methods by adopting the modularity measure, assess the accuracy based on the size of the identified subnetworks, and check the scalability for different sizes of benchmark networks. The experimental findings indicate that our approach shows excellent performance in identifying contextual subnetworks that maintain intensive collaboration amongst researchers for a particular research topic.

Along with the increased importance of technology innovation, the importance of collaboration has been highlighted for conducting the innovation. This study discusses the importance of brokerage role of regions in co-inventor collaboration for establishing novel innovation and new collaboration. In addition, we address how regional collaboration intensity interacts with the brokerage role, highlighting its mediating effect. For this purpose, empirical analysis has been conducted with EPO PATSTAT database and European Regional Database (ERD) covering the European regions between 1986 and 2015. Our finding shows that the brokerage roles contribute to the extension of collaboration network, but are not efficient for the creation of new invention. Collaboration intensity, however, helps both novel innovation and new collaboration, and especially it positively interacts with brokerage role indicating that a region can take the benefit from being broker in collaboration. European Research Council Science Foundation Ireland

Open innovation literature suggests that firms can improve their innovation performance by learning from different actors and, among them, universities, research institutes and innovation intermediaries can play a relevant role. However, the success of such collaborations is still debated. In particular, the firms' internal organisational context seems to be crucial when explaining the success or failure of open innovation: firms attempting to leverage partners' knowledge must design an appropriate internal organisation, made up of organisational practices and managerial mechanisms. Despite this assumption, the role of the firm's internal context in fostering the success of open innovation is poorly investigated, in particular in the case of scientific partners (such as universities and research centres). Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore the relations among collaboration behaviour between a firm and scientific partners, managerial mechanisms and both sides of innovative performance (i.e. novelty and efficiency). Our study, based upon a survey research developed in Finland, Italy and Sweden, suggests that collaborations with scientific partners should be carefully managed, through the development and implementation of managerial mechanisms, in order to foster performance. These managerial mechanisms emerge just as the means (i.e. the mediator) through which the collaboration behaviour can foster innovative performance.

R&D collaboration facilitates pooling of complementary skills, learning from the partner as well as sharing risks and costs. Research therefore repeatedly stressed the positive relationship between collaborative R&D and innovation performance. Fewer studies addressed potential drawbacks of collaborative R&D. Collaborative R&D comes at the costs of coordination and monitoring, requires knowledge disclosure and involves the risk of opportunistic behaviour by the partners. Thus, while the net gains from collaboration can be high initially, cost may start to outweigh those benefits if firms engage in multiple collaborative projects simultaneously. This study explicitly considers a firm's collaboration intensity, that is, the share of collaborative R&D projects in the firms' total R&D project portfolio. For a sample of 2,891 firms located in Germany, active in abroad range of manufacturing and service sectors and of which 86% are SMEs, we indeed find that increasing the share of collaborative R&D projects in total R&D projects is associated with a higher probability of product innovation and with a higher market success of new products. While we can confirm previous findings in terms of gains for innovation performance, we also find that collaboration has decreasing and even negative returns on product innovation if its intensity increases above a certain threshold. Consequently, the relationship between collaboration intensity and innovation has an inverted-U shape. In particular, costs start outweighing benefits if a firm pursues more than about two thirds of its R&D projects in collaboration. This result is robust to conditioning market success to the introduction of new products and to accounting for the selection into collaborating.

Many case studies highlight a positive relationship between regions' innovation performance and the intensity of collaboration among regional organizations. However, few efforts have been made to analyze this relation with quantitative approaches. In addition to a theoretical discussion, the paper presents an empirical investigation on this issue utilizing conditional efficiency analysis and patent co-application data for the Electrics & Electronics industry in 270 German labor market regions. The results show that the relationship between regions' innovation performance and the intensities of regional as well as inter-regional collaboration take the form of an inverted-U shape. Regions with average regional and inter-regional collaboration intensities are found to outperform those characterized by extremely low, high or unbalanced collaboration behavior.

In the biotechnology sector small R&D intensive firms play a fundamental role to keep innovation rates high. With less bureaucratic burdens, low level of hierarchy and high internal flexibility they are able to move fast and to make most efficient use of unique competences. Still their shortage in resources, related to company size, makes them dependent on a strong network of alliances to get access to missing competences and materials. This paper aims at establishing the influence of alliance characteristics on the innovation performance of firms in the biotechnology sector. It presents a conceptual model to clarify the special role of collaboration intensity and how human resource exchange is related to innovation performance of biotechnology alliances.