Pablo D'Este

The pursuit of academic excellence and business engagement: is it irreconcilable?

Universities currently need to satisfy the demands of different audiences. In light of the increasing policy emphasis on “third mission” activities, universities are attempting to incorporate these into their traditional missions of teaching and research. University strategies to accomplishing its traditional missions are well-honed and routinized, but the incorporation of the third mission is posing important strategic and managerial challenges for universities. This study explores the relationship between university–business collaborations and academic excellence in order to examine the extent to which academic institutions can balance these objectives. Based on data from the UK Research Assessment Exercise 2001 at the level of the university department, we find no systematic positive or negative relationship between scientific excellence and engagement with industry. Across the disciplinary fields reported in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (i.e. engineering, hard sciences, biomedicine, social sciences and the humanities) the relationship between academic excellence and engagement with business is largely contingent on the institutional context of the university department. This paper adds to the growing body of literature on university engagement with business by examining this activity for the social sciences and the humanities. Our findings have important implications for the strategic management of university departments and for higher education policy related to measuring the performance of higher education research institutions.

Academic entrepreneurship: what are the factors shaping the capacity of academic researchers to identify and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities?

This paper aims at improving our understanding of the attributes of academic researchers that influence the capacity to identify and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities. We investigate a number of factors highlighted in the literature as influencing the entrepreneurial activities undertaken by academics. Our results show that identification and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities are shaped by different factors. While identification of commercial opportunities is driven by prior entrepreneurial experience and the excellence of the academic work, exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities is driven by the extent of previous collaboration with industry partners, cognitive integration and prior entrepreneurial experience.Trabajo presentado a la 15th International Conference on Scientometrics & Informetrics, celebrada en Estambul (Turquia) del 29 de junio al 4 de julio de 2015.

Exploring and Yet Failing Less: Learning from Exploration, Exploitation and Human Capital in R&D

Exploration is both a risky activity and a key ingredient in the strategy of firms that strive for radical innovations. This paper investigates a dual facet of the exploratory component of R&D activities with regards to innovation failures: while exploration increases firms’ exposure to failure, it also provides learning opportunities to curve down innovation failures. This paper contributes to organizational learning and innovation management research by proposing that firms’ valuable learning does not automatically follow from exploration, but instead,it is conditional on reaching a threshold level of exploratory R&D activities. It is also proposed that valuable learning from exploration is enhanced when exploration is combined with other complementary sources oflearning: exploitation and human capital. Our baseline results point to an inverted U-shaped relation: investment in exploratory activities increases the rate of failure in innovation up to a point beyond which exploration is found to decrease the rate of failure. We observe this inverted U-shaped relationship both at the conception and development phases of the innovation process. We also show that firms’ commitments to exploitative R&D activities and the availability of human capital act as relevant moderators: they contribute to speed the organisational learning process enhanced by exploration and result in lowering the probability of innovation failure at the downstream and conception phases, respectively.

The effect of academic consulting on research performance: evidence from five Spanish universities

This paper investigates whether engagement in consulting activities has a significant impact on the research performance of academic scientists. The study relies on a sample of 2678 individual faculty, from five Spanish universities, who have been recipients of publicly funded grants or have been principal investigators in activities contracted by external agents over the period 1999-2004. By implementing a propensity score matching estimator method, we show that engaging in consulting activities has an overall negative impact on the average number of ISI-publications. However, the effect of consulting on the scientific productivity of academic scientists depends on the scientific fields and the intensity of engagement in consulting activities. Academic consulting is found to have a negative impact in the fields of ‘Natural and Exact Sciences’ and ‘Engineering’, but not in the case of ‘Social Sciences and Humanities’. When the intensity of consulting activity is taken into account at the discipline level, engaging in consulting activities has an overall negative impact on scientific productivity only for high levels of involvement in consulting activities, but not for moderate ones.

Exploring the distinct patterns of engagement in university-industry interactions

This paper investigates two facets of the science base - industry linkages. We develop a rationale to conceptualize U-I interactions in terms of the type of contractual agreement and the degree of finalization. This allows us to distinguish between four modes of U-I interaction: firm creation, technology transfer, co-production, and response modes. We then examine whether scientific stardom and research interdisciplinarity predict the propensity of scientists to interact with any of the four interaction modes. Our empirical results suggest significant effects of scientific impact and interdisciplinarity on university-industry interactions, but largely dependent on the interaction mode. Scientific impact has significant positive effect on technology transfer only beyond a particular threshold; it has a negative effect on the response mode; and no significant effect on firm creation or co-production modes. In contrast, interdisciplinary research has a strong positive impact on the two entrepreneurial-relate...