Hongye Zhao

Hongye Zhao, Yi Zhao, Chengzhi Zhang

The academia and industry are characterized by a reciprocal shaping and dynamic feedback mechanism. Despite distinct institutional logics, they have adapted closely in collaborative publishing and talent mobility, demonstrating tension between institutional divergence and intensive collaboration. Existing studies on their knowledge proximity mainly rely on macro indicators such as the number of collaborative papers or patents, lacking an analysis of knowledge units in the literature. This has led to an insufficient grasp of fine-grained knowledge proximity between industry and academia, potentially undermining collaboration frameworks and resource allocation efficiency. To remedy the limitation, this study quantifies the trajectory of academia-industry co-evolution through fine-grained entities and semantic space. In the entity measurement part, we extract fine-grained knowledge entities via pre-trained models, measure sequence overlaps using cosine similarity, and analyze topological features through complex network analysis. At the semantic level, we employ unsupervised contrastive learning to quantify convergence in semantic spaces by measuring cross-institutional textual similarities. Finally, we use citation distribution patterns to examine correlations between bidirectional knowledge flows and similarity. Analysis reveals that knowledge proximity between academia and industry rises, particularly following technological change. This provides textual evidence of bidirectional adaptation in co-evolution. Additionally, academia's knowledge dominance weakens during technological paradigm shifts. The dataset and code for this paper can be accessed at https://github.com/tinierZhao/Academic-Industrial-associations.

Hongye Zhao, Yi Zhao, Chengzhi Zhang

Academia and industry each possess distinct advantages in advancing technological progress. Academia's core mission is to promote open dissemination of research results and drive disciplinary progress. The industry values knowledge appropriability and core competitiveness, yet actively engages in open practices like academic conferences and platform sharing, creating a knowledge strategy paradox. Highly novel and publicly accessible knowledge serves as the driving force behind technological advancement. However, it remains unclear whether industry or academia can produce more novel research outcomes. Some studies argue that academia tends to generate more novel ideas, while others suggest that industry researchers are more likely to drive breakthroughs. Previous studies have been limited by data sources and inconsistent measures of novelty. To address these gaps, this study conducts an analysis using four types of fine-grained knowledge entities (Method, Tool, Dataset, Metric), calculates semantic distances between entities within a unified semantic space to quantify novelty, and achieves comparability of novelty across different types of literature. Then, a regression model is constructed to analyze the differences in publication novelty between industry and academia. The results indicate that academia demonstrates higher novelty outputs, which is particularly evident in patents. At the entity level, both academia and industry emphasize method-driven advancements in papers, while industry holds a unique advantage in datasets. Additionally, academia-industry collaboration has a limited effect on enhancing the novelty of research papers, but it helps to enhance the novelty of patents. We release our data and associated codes at https://github.com/tinierZhao/entity_novelty.