Etzkowitz, Henry and Loet Leydesdorff 1997 Introduction: Universities in the global knowledge economy. In Universities and the global knowledge economy: A triple helix of university-industry-government relations, ed. by Henry Etzkowitz & Loet Leydesdorff, pp 1-8. London, Pinter.

EXCERPT pp 2-3:

RECOMBINATIONS AMONG KNOWLEDGE FLOWS

  During the early post-war era the laboratories of large industrial firms provided a relatively self-sufficient technological support system for product development (Fusfeld, 1986). During the past two decades, increased international competition, a faster pace of technological development and the downsizing of firms to core competencies have made companies more receptive to external sources of innovation (Soete, 1991).
  An innovation gap has emerged from the shortening of the R&D timescale and the resources available to firms, and from the increase in competencies and technological inputs necessary to accomplish innovation. This innovation gap opens up between individual firms, attending to their short-term needs for product development, and longer-term research, which is often located in university and government laboratories and has the potential to improve existing products incrementally as well as to create future products and processes.
  The current necessity to combine external with internal sources of innovation has revised the role of the industrial laboratory within firms, reducing both their scale and their scope (Rosenbloom and Spencer, 1996). As individual firms externalize many of their innovation activities, the unit of analysis increasingly becomes technological systems viewed as networks of agents interacting in a specific technology area (Hughes, 1987).
  These changes in the economy induce change in other parts of the knowledge infrastructure. Under previous conditions exchange across institutional boundaries was typically organized through arm's-length transactions, often mediated by non- profit organizations to arrange transfer of technology. The norm under this regime was a set of informal arrangements such as consulting ties between companies and individual professors in tacit exchange for fellowship and departmental research funds (cf. Gieryn, 1983).
  Under changed conditions, with universities increasingly viewed as actors in national and regional innovation systems, distinct boundaries are being elided and replaced by a web of ties. Academic institutions are increasingly internalizing and decentralizing intellectual property management and technology transfer activities, inserting the university as an entity in between the faculty and their industrial interlocutors. As new arrangements are put in place, old formats also continue to be utilized, creating a complex interplay among organizations and roles with ensuing conflicts and confluences of interest.
  As the university acquires an industrial penumbra, industry takes on some of the values of the university, sharing as well as protecting knowledge. New institutional infrastructures, combining inputs from diverse sources, are emerging among individual firms for the purpose of generating and diffusing technological knowledge flows into clusters of firms (Carlsson and Stankiewicz, 1991; Egelhoff and Haklisch, 1991; Powell, 1996). Research groups within firms are increasingly becoming elements of research joint ventures and long-term strategic alliances, bringing them into contact with government laboratories and university research groups to achieve a common strategic goal.
  Mixing and matching both of these strategies in different scientific disciplines, technological fields and industrial sectors is a further
possibility. Such a 'hands-on' strategy, however, requires a greater science and technology policy capacity on the part of the state, industry and academia, since judgments of the level and type of intervention in particular areas become more critical.

(So there is a MODE OF PRODUCTION emerging based on linkages among acad-ind- govn)