What motivates academic scientists to engage in research commercialization: ‘Gold’, ‘ribbon’ or ‘puzzle’?

Abstract

The School of Management Working Paper Series is published to circulate the results of on-going research to a wider audience and to facilitate intellectual exchange and debate. The papers have been through a refereeing process and will subsequently be published in a revised form. Requests for permission to reproduce any article or part of the Working Paper should be sent to the publisher of this series. ABSTRACTThis paper employs the three concepts of 'gold' (financial rewards), 'ribbon' (reputational/career rewards) and 'puzzle' (intrinsic satisfaction) to examine the extrinsic and intrinsic aspects of scientists' motivation for pursuing commercial activities. The study is based on 36 individual interviews and an on-line questionnaire survey of 735 scientists from five major UK research universities. It finds that there is a diversity of motivations for commercial engagement, and that many do so for reputational and intrinsic reasons and that financial rewards play a relatively small part. The paper draws on self-determination theory in social psychology to analyse the relationship between scientists' value orientations with regard to commercial engagement and their personal motivations. It finds that those with traditional beliefs about the separation of science from commerce are more likely to be extrinsically motivated, using commercialization as a means to obtain resources to support their quest for the 'ribbon'. In contrast, those identify closely with entrepreneurial norms are intrinsically motivated by the autonomy and 'puzzle-solving' involved in applied commercial research while also motivated by the 'gold'. The study highlights the primacy of scientists' self motivation, and suggests that a fuller explanation of their commercial behaviour will need to consider a broader mix of motives to include the social and affective aspects of intrinsic motivation. In conclusion, the paper argues that policy to encourage commercial engagement should build on reputational and intrinsic rather than purely financial motivations.

Policies to increase the social value of science and the scientist satisfaction. An exploratory survey among Harvard bioscientists.

“…This information is useful to design incentive-based policies. Our survey confirmed that the so-called “puzzle-motivation”—the satisfaction from solving puzzling problems—was an important motivator 13 for almost all basic scientists (among our respondents 93% said that “satisfaction from solving puzzling problems” and 95% that “satisfaction of curiosity” were from “moderately” to “very important” motivations) ( Figure 2B). The so-called “ribbon-motivation”—the gain of prestige and recognition—was significantly more important than the gain of personal money (among our respondents 60% said that the “gain of prestige” was a “moderately” to “very important” motivation for them compared to 41% who said the same for the “gain of money”) ( Figure 2B).…”

“…This type of incentive would make use of the “ribbon-motivation” but without undermining the “puzzle-motivation” or research freedom generally 13 . This system could work by implementing a “bibliography of basic papers” for each newly approved drug.…”

Knowledge transfer activities in social sciences and humanities: Explaining the interactions of research groups with non-academic agents

“…Based on the literature on KT in non-SSH fields, future work on SSH KT should investigate several variables not considered explicitly in this study, for example, research funding sources (Gulbrandsen and Smeby, 2005;Landry et al, 2007Landry et al, , 2010, motivations for collaboration (D'Este and Perkmann, 2011;Lam, 2011) and the perceived barriers to academic collaboration with socio-economic agents (Tartari et al, 2012). Tables Table 1 Definitions of KT activities.…”

Organizational factors influencing scholarly performance: a multivariate study of biomedical research groups

“…Scholarly networks can stimulate academic careers, but science-industry relations do not (van Rijnsoever et al 2008). Others, however, qualify this conclusion (Manjarrés-Henríquez et al 2008), or argue the opposite (Lam 2011;D'Este and Perkmann 2011;Haeussler and Colyvas 2011). In the model, we include the variable the amount of time spend on the various external activities and on networking.…”