Socio-Economic Impact Evaluation of R&D activities

This doctoral thesis summarizes part of the research carried out during the PhD program in Economics and Political Economy at the University of Genoa. The thesis is composed of three different chapters which have a common thread represented by the evaluation of the results and impacts of Research and Development (R&D) activities. More specifically, the first chapter is entitled: 1. Analysis of the scientific collaboration network of Italian Institute of Technology This chapter focuses on the scientific production of the IIT, i.e. on the documents published by the Institute, during the period 2006-2019. I analyzed how the coauthorship network evolved over time, the actors’ position within the network, and their attributes to identify some interesting features of the research organization. Finally, I investigated which practices determine higher performances by identifying the existence of a relationship between the position of researchers in the graphs and their scientific productivity and quality. Specifically, the researchers’ performances are measured by two bibliometric indicators, the number of publications made and of citations received per author, which are among the main quantitative measures for the evaluation of research output. The second chapter is entitled: 2. The dynamics of collaboration between researchers of the Italian Institute of Technology: An ERGM approach In this chapter the co-authorship network of the Italian Institute of Technology was created starting from the list of all the authors affiliated with the IIT. This study encompasses all publications authored by researchers, including those published prior to their affiliation with the Institute. In Chapter 2, I analyzed the structure of the co-authorship network of the IIT, focusing on the authors’ characteristics, then I examined the degree of connection between researchers employed in different Research Domains since interdisciplinary cooperation fosters innovation. Last but not least, I tried to identify the processes that influence link creation. To this end, I analyzed the probability of a link between two authors, in particular how the socio-demographic profile of each author affects their propensity to form a collaborative relationship through an Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM). Finally, since it is feasible that a link between two authors occurs because of the presence of another link within the network, I also included network structure statistics among the model variables. This study contributes to the literature on network formation, one of the most promising research areas, focusing on a specific graph, the co-authorship network of one of the main italian scientific research center. These chapters concern two different applications dealing with Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques applied for the first time to an Italian research center according to a macro, micro, and meso-perspective. The third chapter is entitled: 3. Socio-Economic Impact of a robotics project: the Hannes prosthetic hand In this study the economic and social impacts of a robotics project realized by the IIT and the Prosthesis Center INAIL of Budrio are measured for the first time. The project allowed the development of Hannes, a prosthetic hand used in the field of robot assistance for the treatment of people who have had an amputation of the upper limb due to physical traumas or surgical operations. After a literature review on the main methods of social impact assessment, I decided to apply a methodology called Social Return On Investment (SROI) to assess the impacts of the robotics project. This method investigates the specific relationships between qualitative, quantitative, and financial information and analyzes them to estimate the amount of value created or destroyed by research activities. In literature, few studies consider together different outcomes, such as human factors together with prosthesis performance characteristics, and the present study tries to fill this knowledge gap. To compute the SROI ratio I used the data collected through self-administered questionnaires during a clinical trial that took place from 2020 to 2023. The clinical trial involves 11 patients who are wearers of myoelectric prostheses. The SROI ratio compares the total benefits created by the project against the supported financial investment necessary to obtain them. This thesis aims to measure the impact and influence of research on society and demonstrate how evaluation allows optimizing the decision-making processes of governments, policy-makers, and entrepreneurs.