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

Wesley M. Cohen (), Henry Sauermann () and Paula Stephan
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Wesley M. Cohen: Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708; National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Henry Sauermann: National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138; European School of Management and Technology Berlin, 10178 Berlin, Germany

Management Science, 2020, vol. 66, issue 9, 4108-4117

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.

Keywords: technology commercialization; motivation and incentives; academia-industry interface; academic entrepreneurship; economics of science; research; innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

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https://doi.org/10.287/mnsc.2019.3535 (application/pdf)

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Working Paper: Not in the job description: The commercial activities of academic scientists and engineers (2018)
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