  It is widely recognized that collaboration between the public and private
research sectors should be stimulated and supported, as a means of favoring
innovation and regional development. This work takes a bibliometric approach,
based on co-authorship of scientific publications, to propose a model for
comparative measurement of the performance of public research institutions in
collaboration with the domestic industry collaboration with the private sector.
The model relies on an identification and disambiguation algorithm developed by
the authors to link each publication to its real authors. An example of
application of the model is given, for the case of the academic system and
private enterprises in Italy. The study demonstrates that for each scientific
discipline and each national administrative region, it is possible to measure
the performance of individual universities in both intra-regional and
extra-regional collaboration, normalized with respect to advantages of
location. Such results may be useful in informing regional policies and
merit-based public funding of research organizations.
