This paper aims to explore the impact of organizational context on individuals’ industry activities in Chinese universities. Academic engagement, which includes collaborative research, contract research, consulting and other informal outreach activities, is posited as being jointly determined by organizational and individual level factors. Based on 564 Chinese scientists’ survey responses, our results show that scientists perceiving their university as having a strong entrepreneurial mission or supportive policy context are more active in academic engagement. This relationship is, however, moderated by individual-level factors. Specifically, entrepreneurially oriented university missions and supportive policy are more strongly associated with intra-individual differences in academic engagement for junior scientists, and for scientists with established personal networks to industry. Our analysis also shows that several individual-level predictors of academic engagement identified in studies set in Europe and the US carry over to the Chinese context.

Abstract:Research indicates that non-commercial and informal university-industry interactions, which are defined as academic engagement, account for a larger part and play a more important role than commercialization in academic knowledge transfer in China. This paper aims to explore the effect of Chinese scientists' individual differences on academic engagement via social cognitive theory. This study attempts to provide an interpretation of how individual differences affect Chinese academics' industrial engagement through self-efficacy. Based on data collection from Chinese universities, these analysis results show that gender, academic rank, industry connections, and previous industrial experience are significantly associated with Chinese scientists' industry engagement. Furthermore, a scientist's self-efficacy in industry collaborations is also influenced by these four individual factors. The mediating effects of self-efficacy on the relationship between individual differences and academic engagement are confirmed by empirical analysis results. Implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed at the end of this paper.

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The corresponding author's name was incorrect. The given name and family name were interchanged. It should read as Anders Broström. The original article has been corrected.

Drawing on the theory of planned behavior, this study investigates the impact of academics' perception of university context on their engagement with industry via the mediation of academics' intention to industrial collaborations. The third mission and supportive policy were put forward as two university influence factors. From analysis results of 564 questionnaire responses, we found that academics' perception of university context had significant effect on academic engagement. In addition, the relationship between university mission, supportive policy and academics' industrial engagement were partially mediated by academics' intention to industrial collaboration.