The relationship between academic consulting and research performance: Evidence from five Spanish universities

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between engagement in consulting activities and 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][2000][2001][2002][2003][2004]. By implementing a propensity score matching estimator method, we show that engaging in consulting activities has an overall negative relationship with the average number of ISIpublications. 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 be negatively correlated with the number of publications 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, we find that engaging in consulting activities is negatively correlated with scientific productivity only for high levels of involvement in consulting activities, but not for moderate ones.

The importance of pro-social behaviour for the breadth and depth of knowledge transfer activities: An analysis of Italian academic scientists

“…Finally, we find no significant correlation between academic engagement and scientific productivity. This result is in line with the mixed findings in the literature studying the relationship between academics' research productivity and engagement in KT activities (Azoulay et al, 2009;Rentocchini et al, 2014).…”

The economics of research, consulting, and teaching quality: theory and evidence from a technical university

“…In their sample 81% of researchers in mechanical engineering, 74.4% in civil engineering and 69.8% in electrical and electronic engineering interact with companies through external consulting, whereas such percentages drop to 37.4% for physicists and to only 20.4% for mathematicians. Similar findings come from Landry et al (2010), who compare engineers and natural scientists and from Rentocchini et al (2014), who show that more than 70% of Spanish academics in engineering engage in consulting, as opposed to 40% in other disciplines.…”

Universities and Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS) as Sources of Knowledge for Innovative Firms in Peripheral Regions

“…A lot of policy attention has been given to intellectual propertyrelated interactions, although there is a consensus in the literature that such interactions play a relatively small role (COHEN et al, 2002;AGRAWAL and HENDERSON, 2002). Finally, various forms of academic consulting may play an important role, although this form of engagement remains understudied (PERKMANN and WALSH, 2008;RENTOCCHINI et al, 2013). The characteristics of such links are similar to those interactive exchanges addressed in the KIBS literature, including those of specialized technical services, consultancy and some forms of training.…”