While their expertise and scientific excellence make academic star scientists attractive collaboration partners for firms, this study indicates that firms face difficulties in capturing value from collaborations with academic stars. Stars are time constrained, may be less committed to commercialization, and can be a source of undesired knowledge spillovers to other firms. The purpose of this study is to recognize the contingencies under which collaboration with star scientists is positively associated with a firm's ability to produce valuable patents (invention performance). We analyze a panel dataset on the collaborations in basic research(publication data) and invention performance (patent output) of 60 prominent pharmaceutical firms. We find that basic research collaboration with academic stars is on average not associated with a performance premium above the overall positive influence of collaborating with academia. We only observe this premium if the star scientist abstains from simultaneous collaboration with other firms ('dedication') and extend her collaboration with the firm to involvenot only basic but also applied research ('translation'). Extending prior work that has focused on corporate star scientists, we find that if the collaboration involves an internal firm star scientist, a translational contribution of the academic star is no longer a prerequisite, and may even be detrimental to inventive performance. Our findings inform the literatures on industry-science links and firms' (scientific) absorptive capacity by revealing the crucial contingencies for firms to benefit from partnering with the best and brightest among academic scientists. Practitioner Points:-Intuitively we may expect that collaborating with the very top among academics benefits firms, yet collaborating with these academic star scientists also entails important challenges.-Organizations seeking to benefit from the extraordinary expertise of academic star scientists should take into account two important conditions: o The top academic should be a dedicated collaboration partner, and avoid simultaneous collaboration with other firms. o The top academic should not only be involved in basic research but also in applied research collaboration with the firm, enhancing her ability to assist the firm in the translation of research into a marketable product. -When the firm also employs a star scientist who is engaged in the collaborative research with an academic star scientist, the translation of the joint research is better performed by the internally employed star scientists instead of the academic star scientist.

Pharmaceutical firms are extremely selective in deciding which patented drug candidates are taken up into clinical development, given the high costs and risks involved. We argue that the scientific base of drug candidates, and who was responsible for that scientific research, are key antecedents of take-up into clinical trials and whether the patent owner ('internal take-up') or another firm ('external take-up') leads the clinical development effort. We hypothesize that patented drug candidates that refer to scientific research are more likely to be taken up in development, and that in-house conducted scientific research is predominantly associated with internal take-up due to the ease of knowledge transfer within the firm. Examining 18,360 drug candidates patented by 136 pharmaceutical firms we find support for these hypotheses. In addition, drug candidates referring to in-house scientific research exhibit a higher probability of eventual drug development success. Our findings underline the importance of a 'rational drug design' approach that explicitly builds on scientific research. The benefits of internal scientific research in clinical development highlight the potential downside of pervasive organizational specialization in the life sciences in either scientific research or clinical development.

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