Not in the Job Description: The Commercial Activities of Academic Scientists and Engineers

Abstract

Scholarly work seeking to understand academics’ commercial activities often draws on abstract notions of the academic reward system and the representative scientist. Few scholars have examined whether and how scientists’ motives to engage in commercial activities differ across fields. Similarly, efforts to understand academics’ choices have focused on three self-interested motives—recognition, challenge, and money—ignoring the potential role of the desire to have an impact on others. Using panel data for a national sample of over 2,000 academics employed at U.S. institutions, we examine how the four motives are related to commercial activity measured by patenting. We find that all four motives are correlated with patenting, but these relationships differ systematically between the life sciences, physical sciences, and engineering. These field differences are consistent with differences across fields in the rewards from commercial activities as well as in the degree of overlap between traditional and commercializable research, which affects the opportunity costs of time spent away from “traditional” academic work. We discuss potential implications for policy makers, administrators, and managers as well as for future research on the scientific enterprise. This paper was accepted by Toby Stuart, entrepreneurship and innovation.

University Innovation and the Professor's Privilege

“…In Norway, the professor's privilege (laererunntaket in Norwegian) was abolished by unanimous Parliament decision in June 2002, and made effective for all public higher education institutions from January 1, 2003. 4 The new law gave the university the formal ownership rights to the commercialization of research (including start-ups and patents). Each Norwegian university also formally established a Technology Transfer Office (T TO).…”

“…When asked whether the reform had a positive, neutral, or negative effect on their interests in commercialization, 56 university inventors responded, with the majority (34) expressing no effect, while negative effect (15) was expressed twice as often as positive effect (7). 54 When asked how their colleagues viewed the reform, the inventors usually said they did not know; however, they again expressed a negative effect (10) about twice as often as a positive effect (4). See Table 11 and online Appendix III for further detail.…”

The Open Innovation in Science research field: a collaborative conceptualisation approach

“…In this sense, the conventional assumption that scientists' research activities are motivated by intrinsic satisfaction and reputational rewards, while their commercial activities are driven by the desire for financial gain, may reflect an oversimplified view of human motivation (Lam 2015). Rather, scientists are driven by a wide variety of motivational factors, including the desires to produce new knowledge, solve a particular problem, and transform their discoveries into societal impact (Bammer 2008;Cohen, Sauermann, and Stephan 2020;Huutoniemi et al 2010;Lam 2011;Siedlok, Hibbert, and Beech 2014).…”

“…Other field-specific factors that influence the adoption of open and collaborative practices relate to incentive structures (e.g. Leahey, Beckman, and Stanko 2017;Siedlok, Hibbert, and Beech 2014), the extent of collaboration (Lewis, Ross, and Holden 2012), and the opportunity costs of commercialisation (Cohen, Sauermann, and Stephan 2020).…”

Crowds, citizens, and science: a multi-dimensional framework and agenda for future research

“…In traditional academic science, salient rewards include authorship and reputation among peers, which translate into other benefits such as job security (tenure) and income (Stephan 2012;Merton 1973). Curiosity and desires for social impact can also be important motivators (Cohen, Sauermann, and Stephan 2020). 21 A similar approach has been taken in recent work studying the division of labour between lead investigators and staff in traditional research projects (Shibayama, Baba, and Walsh 2015).…”