innovation teams. Accompanying the governmental supports at the policy and
institutional levels, the number of research teams in universities is increasing and
their research level is rising.
6.1.2.2 Incentive System for Research Activities
Research incentive system in university refers to, the management system that can
inspire the motivations of research staff to achieve high-level expected goals of
research activity. Next, we will review the related literature from the perspectives of
inside universities and outside universities.
- Incentives inside universities
According to their different approaches, there are mainly two categories of
incentives, one is content-based incentive, and the other is process-based
incentive. Content-based incentive emphasizes to incent university staff in a
reasonable way according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, namely to satisfy
their various needs, and then reach their full potentials (Zhang 2001 ; Ding
2003 ). However, for those university staffs with advanced knowledge, they can
never be fully satisfied by materials, and they usually chase for something more
moral and spiritual, such as social recognition (Wang 2011 ). And the latter is
process-based incentive.- Incentives outside universities
According to the existing literature, most studies are focused on the impacts of
competitive research funds on university research efficiency. A recent study of
Wolszczak-Derlacz and Parteka ( 2011 ) found that the design of research
incentive system is of great importance to the research efficiency of universities.
They found that the higher the ratio of governmental to total grants, the lower
the university efficiency would be, which demonstrates the limitation of gov-
ernment funds on the improvement of university research efficiency. A study
focusing on the association of university autonomy and competitive research
funds, found that the research efficiency increased as the degree of autonomy
and competition increased (Aghion et al. 2009 ).
6.1.2.3 International Cooperation and Communication
According to existing literature, many researchers pointed out that, effective and
close international cooperation and communication are good for forming global
academic community, and also good for producing high quality research products.
A study of Liang et al. ( 2015 ) found that frequency of international visits of uni-
versity faculty members impacted on their research productivities. More specifically,
there is a strong association between the number of faculty members’international
266 6 Exploring Factors Impacting on Research Efficiency...