Taste for science, academic boundary spanning and inventive performance of industrial scientists and engineers

Sam Arts and Reinhilde Veugelers

No 555548, Working Papers of Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven

Abstract: Matching survey data on Ph.D. scientists and engineers currently working in an R&D job in industry with their publications and patents, we study the relationship between their motives and their inventive performance. We find that individuals with a strong taste for science, i.e. motivated by intellectual challenge, independence, and contribution to society, create more novel and valuable patents. We find partial mediation of the effect of taste for science on value-weighted inventive output through academic boundary spanning, proxied by scientific publications co-authored with academic scientists. For novelty of inventive output, we find no mediation through academic boundary spanning. We confirm the negative relation between academic co-publications and annual base salary in industry. This helps to explain why individuals with a strong taste for salary collaborate less with academic scientists, negatively affecting their value-weighted inventive output.

Keywords: taste for science; boundary spanning; industry-science links (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ino, nep-knm and nep-tid
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Published in FEB Research Report - MSI_1612

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