From Universities to Private Companies

Abstract

In publishing their education background together with the professional experience, users make LinkedIn a privileged web source for understanding “University-Industry” connections. Precisely, the main goal of this study is to test LinkedIn as a valid source for analyses oriented to the quantification of the university-industry interactions. To this end, the authors propose two different procedures (method A: direct through the URL mentions between LinkedIn profiles; and Method B: indirect through the information from LinkedIn University Pages), comparing them against the direct procedure based on URL mentions between official websites (Method C). To do this, the authors have selected the whole Spanish academic system. The results show that method A is unusable yet due to the low web connectivity between LinkedIn profiles, while method B provides reliable though too volatile data that complements method C, which reveal in turn relations of different nature.