The Triple Helix and New Production of Knowledge: Prepackaged Thinking on Science and Technology

This comment considers the approaches expressed in the books by Gibbons et al., "The New Production of Knowledge" (1994) and Nowotny et al., "Re-Thinking Science" (2001), and in the body of work pioneered over the last few years by Henry Etzkowitz and Loet Leydesdorff which expounds the 'Triple Helix' analysis of industry/university/government relations. Citation analyses and Internet search data are used to explore the geographical locations, audiences and 'impact' of this work. The strengths and weaknesses of these approaches are discussed, and the challenge of ensuring that they become more than fleeting fads, nourishing an unproductive frenzy, but develop so as to contribute something enduring to scholarship and practice.