R&D and innovation efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic: The role of universities

Universities, as research institutions, played a significant role in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. This study examines how the pandemic and its related necessities affected the scope and type of research, development, and innovation (RDI) at universities in eight Central-Eastern European (CEE) countries. All Facebook posts from March 2020 until June 2021 were collected and using pandemic-related keywords, relevant posts were further extracted, coded and analyzed. Our findings elucidated significant differences among the universities in their RDI efforts during the pandemic. Austrian universities exhibited higher levels of inter-institutional research and business collaborations, whereas the RDI efforts in the rest of the CEE sample universities were geared to solve more immediate needs the pandemic brought on. One of the main contributions of this study is the understanding of the RDI potential of the region and the relevance of establishing inter-institutional and business cooperation networks at national and international levels. The study shows that during the pandemic universities demonstrated high RDI potential to quickly react to critical needs, offered open innovations, open licensing, showed collaborative abilities and effective use of their academic and student resources.