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This article aimed to identify the effect of university-industry collaborations on the innovative performance of firms operating in the advanced materials field, and it proposed an original classification of the research organization partners. The main contribution resides in the estimation of the role played by collaborations with differently experienced corporate researchers. In the advanced materials industry the most effective collaborations are driven by "core researchers," who have been involved in authoring scientific papers, in addition to applying sizeable patents. The results of the case study focusing on partner firms collaborating with "Pasteur scientists" such as Fujishima and Hashimoto of the University of Tokyo confirm the idea that "core researchers" have the quality to work as boundary spanners between science and technology, and their becoming heavy-weighted project leaders pushed the firms' R&D towards commercialization.

Using Stokes's (1997) "quadrant model of scientific research," this paper deals with how the entrepreneurial orientation of scientists affects their scientific performance by considering its impact on scientific production (number of publications), scientific prestige (number of forward citations), and breadth of research activities (interdisciplinarity). The results of a quantitative analysis applied to a sample of 1,957 scientific papers published by 66 scientists active in advanced materials research in Japan found that (i) entrepreneurial scientists publish more papers than traditional scientists do, (ii) the papers published by Bohr scientists (traditional scientists with a stronger intention to fundamentality) demonstrate better citation performance than those published by Pasteur scientists (entrepreneurial scientists with a stronger intention to fundamentality) do, on average; (iii) if the focus is confined to high-impact papers, their prestige (i.e., forward citation counts) is favored by the authorship of Pasteur scientists; and (iv) the portfolio interdisciplinarity of papers authored by Pasteur scientists is higher (more diverse) than that of Bohr scientists.2

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