Abstract
In this paper, we analyze the research productivity of faculty entrepreneurs at 15 research institutes using a novel database combining faculty characteristics, licensing information, and journal publication records. We address two related research questions. First, are faculty entrepreneurs more productive researchers (“star scientists”) compared to their colleagues? Second, does the productivity of faculty entrepreneurs change after they found a firm? We find that faculty entrepreneurs in general are more productive researchers than control groups. We use multiple performance criteria in our analysis: differences in mean publication rate, skewness of publication rate, and impact of publications (journal citation rate). These findings bring together previous work on star scientists by Zucker, Darby, and Brewer [Zucker, L. G., Darby M. R., & Brewer M. B. (1998). The American Economic Review, 88, 290–306.] and tacit knowledge among university entrepreneurs by Shane [Shane, S. (2002). Management Science, 48, 122–137.] and Lowe [Lowe, R. A. (2001). In G. Libecap (Ed.) Entrepreneurial Inputs and Outcomes. Amsterdam: JAI Press, Lowe, R.A. (2006). Journal of Technology Transfer, 31(4), 412–429]. Finally, we find that faculty entrepreneurs’ productivity not only is greater than their peers but also does not decrease following the formation of a firm.
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Notes
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Act 77 of 2001, “Tobacco Settlement Act”.
UAMS Website: http://www.uamsbiotech.com/companies.
We use the term research institutions to collectively refer to the 14 universities and one national laboratory in our sample. We include Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBL) as a comparable institution to the universities because a number of LBL researchers maintained appointments at the University of California and were subject to similar intellectual property policies and practices during the sample frame.
For simplicity, we use the terms “universities” and “faculty”, particularly in developing hypotheses about scientist entrepreneurs, to include research laboratories and scientists at research laboratories, respectively.
Note that the University of California (UC) included nine different campuses, six of which had an independent Office of Technology Transfer during the period we are studying (1990–1999). But, UC policies with respect to licensing and start-ups are consistent across all campuses.
Quoted in Yang, E. “Some see conflict in transfer of research to private sector” San Diego Union-Tribune, October 26, 2003.
The Bayh–Dole Act of 1980 gave universities the right to retain title to and license inventions resulting from research supported by federal grants.
Note that two pairs of departments were merged, Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering as well as Materials Science and Physics, because the faculty entrepreneurs within each pair often published in the same or similar journals.
We refer as an active technology transfer office (TTO) if at the year of graduation, the TTO was in operation. The source of information was an annual survey published by the Association of University Technology Managers which lists the year each university established a technology transfer office on their campus.
This observation suggests one hypothesis: that graduate schools starting technology transfer offices before or shortly after the Bayh–Dole Act was passed may have been with higher quality graduate programs, and thus attracted higher quality researchers. However, we do not have direct evidence on this hypothesis, and leave further testing to future work.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank seminar participants at Carnegie Mellon University, Dartmouth College, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Penn State University for helpful comments and feedback as well as thoughtful comments by Jerry Thursby and Arvids Ziedonis. The authors also thank Stephanie Yeung for excellent research assistance as well as UMI for providing some of the data utilized in the paper. The data collection for this paper was generously funded by the Berkman Foundation Fund and the Carnegie Bosch Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Gonzalez-Brambila also thanks CONACyT for generous financial support.
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Lowe, R.A., Gonzalez-Brambila, C. Faculty Entrepreneurs and Research Productivity. J Technol Transfer 32, 173–194 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-006-9014-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-006-9014-y