Promoting academic engagement: university context and individual characteristics

Abstract

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.

Scientist or Entrepreneur? Identity centrality, university entrepreneurial mission, and academic entrepreneurial intention

“…More specifically, this study found that the university mission to support entrepreneurship influences academic scientists' willingness and ability to commercialise research through spinoffs. This finding enriches not only the current debate in the literature especially on the importance of external and contextual factors in supporting entrepreneurship (O'Kane et al 2019;Perkmann et al 2013;Zhao et al 2020), but also opens up a new avenue for discussion whether the existing policies have been focusing too heavily on spin-offs and neglecting other forms of commercialization activities. This situation is highly challenging The moderating effect of UEM on the relationship between EIC and SOI (positive) Supported The moderating effect of UEM on the relationship between EIC and PLI (negative) Rejected The moderating effect of UEM on the relationship between EIC and CCI (negative) Rejected H4b…”

“…For contracting research and consulting activities, we can apply a similar argument. as we known from (Fernández-Pérez et al 2015;Zhao et al 2020), contracting research and consulting activities are largely affected by social networking, academic scientists with higher scientific identity centrality usually make their effort to build up personal social networks and engage in contracting research and consulting activities. In this case, the conflict of social norms between academia and industry will not play a lead role.…”

“…In the last two decades, the policies and governance of many universities have changed with regard to their greater intention and efforts to foster an entrepreneurial climate (Acs et al 2017;Hayter 2015). Universities are now more entrepreneurial and proactive in transferring their research to society (Abreu and Grinevich 2013;Zhao et al 2020). Institutional mechanisms, such as technology transfer offices, entrepreneurship curricula, enterprise centres, and university-based incubators, have been created to facilitate the growing interest of universities in entrepreneurial activities (Rasmussen and Wright 2015;Wright et al 2008Wright et al ,2004.…”

Efficiency in university-industry collaboration: an analysis of UK higher education institutions

“…While the level of regional development 11 and an institutional focus on STEM subjects 12 both positively influence engagement for one group of universities (those having a concentration of research-intensive institutions), the same is not true of the other group. These results point to the importance of institutional factors as determinants of UIC, a finding that contrasts with the extant literature that ascribes a greater impact of individual characteristics-especially for contract research (D'Este & Patel, 2007;Thune et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2020). However, the impacts of university-level factors can be different between types of institutions.…”

Entrepreneurial Intention before and during COVID-19—A Case Study on Portuguese University Students

“…Universities have a mission of teaching, investigating, and transferring knowledge to society and, subsequently, their entrepreneurial activities are their third mission [18,19]. Universities are becoming increasingly proactive in transferring their research to society [20]. The creation of technology transfer offices, business centers, technology parks, and incubators based on universities have greatly contributed to this [21,22].…”