Cornelia Lawson

Flying the Nest: How the Home Department Shapes Researchers' Career Paths

This paper studies the importance of the socialization environment – nest – for the career destinations of early career researchers. In a sample of research groups in the fields of science and engineering at universities in Germany, we identify research orientation, output, funding as well as openness to industry and commercialization as relevant components. Nests that attract more public funding and are led by professors with high research performance are more likely to produce researchers that take jobs in public research, while links to industry predict jobs in the private sector. In a more nuanced analysis that differs by type of industry employment we find that larger firms also recruit from groups with higher scientific performance, while SMEs recruit from nests with a higher patent productivity. A focus on experimental development instead is associated with academic start-ups, and an applied focus with employment in consulting. Recommendations for research training are discussed.

Research Grants, Sources of Ideas and the Effects on Academic Research

Based on a sample of research units in science and engineering at German universities, this study reports survey evidence on the relationship between research grants and research content. Research units that receive funds from industry are more likely to source ideas from the private sector. The higher the share of industry funding in a units total budget, the more likely it is that large firms influence the research agenda. Public research grants, on the other hand, are associated with a higher importance of conferences and scientific sources. What is more, the different sources of ideas impact scientific output. Research units that source research ideas from small- and medium-sized firms patent more, but are not more successful than others in terms of the impact of their inventions on future patents. If, on the other hand, research units source ideas from large firms, we find them to publish less and with lower impact on future scientific work.

Academic Inventions Outside the University: Investigating Patent Ownership in the UK

This paper investigates the ownership of academic patents for a sample of UK academics and challenges the existing definition of the university invention ownership model. The first descriptive results show that 50 per cent of patents are owned by industry; however, 37 per cent of these firm-assigned patents are in fact owned by university spin-offs. We investigate how university policy and funding acquisition impacts industry versus university ownership, and find that funding from large firms predicts involvement in patenting and, to a lesser extent, firm ownership. University ownership of academic patents is more likely the higher the amount of funding coming from SMEs, and at universities that outsource the filing of patents. Spin-off patents occupy an intermediate position showing strong similarities to both firm and university patents.

Researchers’ Mobility and its Impact on Scientific Productivity

This article analyses the impact of mobility on researchers’ productivity. We address the relationship by developing a theoretical framework based on the job-matching approach for academics and the idea that productivity is driven by capital availability and peer effects. The empirical analysis is based on the entire careers of a sample of 171 UK academic researchers, spanning from 1957 to 2005. We analyse the impact of job changes on post mobility output in 3 and 6 year periods. Contrary to common wisdom, we do not find evidence that mobility per se increases academic performance. Mobility to better department s has a positive but weakly significant impact while downward mobility results in decreasing researchers’ productivity. Once we control for mobility associated with career progress, the results indicate significant strong positive impact for mobility to higher quality department. We estimated a set of alternative specifications of mobility finding evidence of an increase of productivity for mobility from industry to academia but only after an initial negative effect. In most cases mobility is associated with short-term decrease of productivity due to hypothesised adjustment costs.

A first look at multiple institutional affiliations: a study of authors in Germany, Japan and the UK

This study sheds light on the unexplored phenomenon of multiple institutional affiliations using scientific publications. Institutional affiliations are important in the organisation and governance of science. Multiple affiliations may alter the traditional framework of academic employment and careers and may require a reappraisal of institutional assessment based on research outcomes of affiliated staff. Results for authors in three major science and technology nations (Germany, Japan and the UK) and in three fields (biology, chemistry, and engineering) show that multiple affiliations have at least doubled over the past few years. The analysis proposes three major types of multiple affiliations that depend on the structure of the research sector and its international openness. Highly internationalised and higher education-centred affiliations are most common for researchers in the UK whereas Germany and Japan have stronger cross-sector affiliation patterns. International multiple affiliations are, however, still more common in Germany compared to Japan which is characterised by a domestic, cross-sector affiliation distribution. Moreover, multiple affiliation authors are more often found on high impact papers, particularly in the case of authors from Japan and Germany in the fields of biology and chemistry.

Temporary Mobility - A Policy for Academic Career Development

Researcher mobility has received increasing support from policy makers around the world as an instrument to improve the performance of research systems by promoting the diffusion of knowledge, and facilitating knowledge and technology transfer, network creation, and productivity (OECD, 2008). International mobility grants have been a preferred means for governments across the world to facilitate the mobility of their research base (MEXT, 2009). This paper investigates the effect of temporary mobility spells abroad on a researcher’s probability for promotion. Temporary research visits may help to expand existing networks and promote knowledge transfer while at the same time ensuring career stability, identified as the main barrier to mobility in Europe and Japan (Stephan, 2012). Using a dataset of 370 bioscience professors in Japan we identified their average career path and evaluated the role of mobility in Japanese universities. We find that international research visits have a positive effect on promotion and reduce the waiting time for promotion by one year. This provides evidence that these visits also benefit a researcher’s career in the long-term. This positive research visit effect is weaker for researchers who also change jobs. Research visits may therefore present a way for immobile researchers to speed up promotion without the need for job mobility. We also find that research visits are particularly important for inbred researchers, again indicating that visits discourage late-career mobility and increase promotion speed. We further find that, while research visits of tenured staff enhance the career by providing an early chair, postdocs have no lasting effect on career progression. Instead, they may be an indicator for a researcher’s struggle to find a permanent position after the PhD

The Role of Early Career Factors in Academic Patenting

This paper explores the characteristics of persistent academic inventors and how they are influenced by their personal attributes, PhD institution, and first invention. Using a novel dataset on 555 UK academic inventors, we find that the quality of the first invention is the best predictor for subsequent participation in the patenting process. We further find evidence for a positive training effect whereby researchers that were trained at universities that had already established commercialisation units have a higher propensity to patent persistently. In addition, researchers that gained first patenting experience in industry are able to benefit from stronger knowledge flows and receive more citations than their purely academic peers.

Flying the Nest: How the Home Department Shapes Researchers' Career Paths.

This paper studies the importance of the socialization environment – nest – for the career destinations of early career researchers. In a sample of research groups in the fields of science and engineering at universities in Germany, we identify research orientation, output, funding as well as openness to industry and commercialization as relevant components. Nests that attract more public funding and are led by professors with high research performance are more likely to produce researchers who take jobs in public research, while links to industry predict jobs in the private sector. In a more nuanced analysis that differentiates between types of industry employment, we find that larger firms also recruit from groups with higher scientific performance, while small and medium-sized firms recruit from nests with a higher patent productivity. A focus on experimental development instead is associated with academic start-ups, and an applied focus with employment in consulting. Recommendations for research training are discussed.

How Industry Inventors Collaborate with Academic Researchers: The Choice between Shared and Unilateral Governance

We investigate under what circumstances firms (industry inventors) are more likely to engage in interactions where governance of the relationship is shared between the firm and the university, as opposed to interactions where the relationship is governed unilaterally by the firm. Using PIEMINV, an original dataset of European industry patents in the Italian region of Piedmont, we analyse the characteristics of inventors with diverse experience in projects involving interactions with universities, governed by institutional contracts or personal contracts. Our results suggest that reliance among inventors of the two forms of governance is almost equal, and that unilateral governance forms are preferred when there are high levels of trust among the parties based on embeddedness in local social and education networks. This is likely because it involves less cumbersome and more direct interactions. We find also that knowledge characteristics are not particularly important discriminants of the choice between governance forms: the advantage of shared governance seems to reside mainly in the possibility to mitigate monitoring and asymmetric information problems in contexts of relatively low levels of mutual knowledge and trust.

Appointment, Promotion, and Mobility of Bioscience Researchers in Japan

Using a data set of 370 bioscience professors in Japan, this chapter investigates the effect of PhD training, early career job transition, and international mobility on a professors probability of both placement at a highly ranked institution and promotion. We found that the prestige of the PhD institution is the best predictor for initial placement and that inbreeding is more common at prestigious institutions. Mobility results in promotion in lower-ranked universities, indicating a strategic decision to move down for promotional benefits. International research visits have a positive effect on promotion but do not affect access to prestigious institutions. Postdoctoral stays have no effect. We also found that merit does not determine promotion duration of early career academics or initial placement but that it does predict promotion to full professor. It also affects the propensity to be placed in a highly ranked university in mid-to late-career stages.