Examining social networks between educational institutions, industrial partners, and the Canadian government

Between 2000 and 2010, the Canadian federal government disbursed $716 893 740 in research grants through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)'s Research Partnerships Programs. This is only one branch, of one agency, in the immense bureaucracy of government funding. This study will examine the social networks which resulted from these research grants. Over this eleven years period, 6112 individual grants were awarded through these programs, involving 187 educational institutions and 4231 industrial partners. We used social network analysis (SNA) to explore these networks. We employed centrality measures to identify key entities in the networks and visualization tools to provide a “big-picture” view of the network topology. Specifically, this study will examine changing trends in the leading educational institutions, industrial partners, and areas of research over the last decade. While the limited scope of our study can only manage to scratch the surface of such a large network, we aim to provide a broad over-view of the problem and, hopefully, to demonstrate the importance of, and to inspire, future explorations in this complex field.