Enterprise university as a digital ecosystem : visual analysis of academic collaboration

The concept of "enterprise university" [1] emerged to denote the new kind of higher education institution that resembles many elements of corporate governance. It has a tighter interaction and integration in the environment, as has to take in account market factors, such as student fee incomes, soft budget allocations for special initiatives, including research funding, risk factors and others. Hence an enterprise university can be viewed as a digital ecosystem. An essential part for the survival of such system is collaboration between academics. This paper presents a visual analytics methodology for analysis of academic collaboration that is geared towards real-time performance. We introduce a simple collaboration index in order to depict slices of prominent collaborators and investigate the networked clusters them. We demonstrate the work on an integrated data set from real-world University. The technology is a key component in the extended business intelligence support for the senior executive teams in these new type of digital ecosystems.