Knowledge and Social Development

The project was three years project funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea and the research funding was supported under the project name of the Social Science of Korea (SSK). Under the SSK Project, our research was titled “Knowledge Production and Social Development.” The project continued about three years from Sep. 2010 to Aug. 2013. The core researchers were Jung Cheol Shin (Seoul National University), Han Woo Park (Youngnam University), and Loet Leydesdorff (University of Amsterdam). Through the collaborative research, the research team produced three books and more than 20 articles in internationally outstanding journals. The major research question focuses on how knowledge is produced, how knowledge is transformed to educate humans, how it contributes to social development, and finally how it is used to produce new knowledge. The project promotes academic research on the cross-disciplinary approaches on knowledge production and its social uses. For the study, the researchers developed knowledge cycle framework to theorize knowledge and social development, and applied triple-helix method to empirically analyze the collaboration between the three core sectors (university, government, and industry).