The relationship between universities and business: identification of thematic communities

This article analyses the link between universities and business from a neo-Schumpeterian evolutionary theory perspective. It aims to identify the thematic communities present in the literature that deals with the university-business relationship, highlighting the focuses of interest of this literature and currently emerging themes. Social network analysis and text mining tools are used for this purpose. The present contribution differs from other reviews by using large datasets, which made it possible to discern aggregate trends in scientific output. Six thematic communities were detected in the literature: technology parks, entrepreneurial university, triple helix, transfer channels, geographic perspective and open innovation. Once these communities were defined, the characteristics of each one were identified, along with their linkages, differences and limitations, with a view to gaining an understanding of the knowledge transfer processes.