The Croatian path from socialism to European membership through the lens of technology transfer policies

Švarc, J and Dabić, M ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8374-9719, 2019. The Croatian path from socialism to European membership through the lens of technology transfer policies. The Journal of Technology Transfer. ISSN 0892-9912

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Abstract

The transition from a socialist economy to one of capitalism brought, to many countries that had previously been socialist, a drastic decline in their technological competences, technological transfers, and research activities after the 1990s. This research seeks to assess whether or not the policy of technology transfer practised during the socialist era improved for these countries following their entry to a capitalist regime and their subsequent joining of the European Union, and whether or not these two processes (which historically coincide for many previously socialist countries) correlate. Croatia is used as an example of a typical transition country possessive of a specific type of market socialism, with controversial outcomes arising from its particular transition process in comparison to its peers. Despite the assistance of the European Union, which helped many new members from socialist backgrounds to recover their economies by upgrading their technological capabilities, this research reveals that technology transfer in less technologically developed countries is unfolding very slowly. Technological transfer occurs as a highly contextual phenomenon, dependant not only on the structure of the economy and technological and research capacities, but also on the political economy and the type of capitalism. This research identifies the three phases of the evolution of university technology transfer: science based models in socialism; endeavours towards an innovation based model throughout the transition period; and the bureaucratic model, driven by the EU cohesion policy and facilitated through access to the European Structural Funds. This research points out that bureaucratic-driven types of technology transfer should be coupled with nationally concerned actions on overall economic and political reforms in order to gain efficient results from their technology transfer efforts.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	The Journal of Technology Transfer
Creators:	Švarc, J. and Dabić, M.
Publisher:	Springer New York
Date:	15 April 2019
ISSN:	0892-9912
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1007/s10961-019-09732-1 DOI 9732 Publisher Item Identifier
Rights:	This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Business School
Record created by:	Jonathan Gallacher
Date Added:	29 May 2019 11:06
Last Modified:	29 May 2019 11:08
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/36672

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