Substituting face-to-face contacts in academics’ collaborations: modern communication tools, proximity, and brokerage

Prior analyses of face-to-face contacts in collaborations have focused on one substitute only. Instead, we analyse various potential substitutes for face-to-face contacts in collaborations. Based on 45 interviews with academics from five leading European universities of technology our findings show that face-to-face contacts are closely...

Personal and social proximity empowering collaborations: The glue of knowledge networks

The proximity framework serves to analyse and understand how collaborations form and develop over time, and how these affect innovation and learning. The framework has inspired and informed empirical studies in several contexts, contributing to our understanding of the dynamics of dyadic collaborations, industrial clusters and districts, and...

Moving up the ladder: heterogeneity influencing academic careers through research orientation, gender, and mentors

We look into the question whether heterogeneity stemming from research orientation, gender, or disciplinary and cultural differences with their PhD supervisors helps or hampers academics’ careers. Based on a sample of 248 academics at two leading European universities of technology, we combine multinomial logit models and sequential logit...

Personal and related kinds of proximity driving collaborations: a multi-case study of Dutch nanotechnology researchers

Previous studies investigating proximity and collaboration have not clarified personal elements, such as working or communication style. Here, we show that personal proximity—close similarity in terms of personal traits and behavioral patterns—substantially affects the whole life cycle of research collaborations. We conduct a multi-case study...