The Community Structure of Research and Development Cooperation in Europe: Evidence from a Social Network Perspective

The focus of this article is on precompetitive research and development (R&D) cooperation across Europe, as captured by R&D joint ventures funded by the European Commission in the time period 1998-2002, within the Fifth Framework Programme. The cooperations in this program give rise to a bipartite network with 72,745 network edges between 25,839 actors (representing organizations that include firms, universities, research organizations, and public agencies) and 9,490 R&D projects. Participating actors are linked only through joint projects. In this article, we describe a community-identification problem based on the concept of modularity, use the recently introduced label-propagation algorithm to identify communities in the network and differentiate the identified communities by developing community-specific profiles with social network analysis and geographic visualization techniques. We expect the results to enrich our picture of the European Research Area (ERA) by providing new insights into the global and local structures of R&D cooperation across Europe.