Is there a link between Doctoral Education and Science and Technology Parks? A Literature Review

Knowledge production and dissemination have been assumed to be one of the main competitive factors in contemporaneous societies. Hence, two changes have been occurring: doctoral education went through deep transformations, with attempts to turn Ph.Ds. more oriented to problem-solving; and the emergence of Science and Technology Parks (STPs) as dynamic clusters able to accelerate economic growth and international competitiveness. This paper aims to understand how these two phenomena relate by exploring the literature that articulates STPs and Ph.Ds. The search on SCOPUS revealed the almost inexistence of papers relating the two. Thus, the search was extended to STPs and their relationship with universities, along with doctoral training, using Google Scholar. However, even this extended analysis reveals that the literature does not explore the relationship between Ph.Ds. and STPs. The paper concludes with the need to further study how STPs, with which universities collaborate, can relate to doctoral formation.