What are the trade-offs of academic entrepreneurship? An investigation on the Italian case

Abstract

This study addresses the following research questions: what happens to the propensity to collaborate with other firms, once the researcher creates her own venture? Do her collaborations decrease or do they grow? These questions have been overlooked by the current literature, even though they carry important policy implications. Our key suggestion is that the effectiveness of a technology transfer tool can be better assessed by taking into account the possible crowding-out effects with other channels of knowledge transfer. We do so for Italy, by comparing the behavior of single researchers, before and after the establishment of their own firm, with the behavior of a control group. We assess whether those academics that founded their own firm significantly change their attitude to perform research collaborations with other firms by means of co-publication and co-patenting. We also verify whether creating a firm has an impact on the overall patenting and publication performance. Our results suggest that there is a negative effect on the overall publishing performance, while the patenting activity does not change significantly. Regarding co-publications, our results confirm the existence of a substitution effect between spin-offs and co-publication with firms, while we observe an increase in the case of co-patenting. A closer look at the data, however, suggests that the latter is mainly triggered by the patenting activity that the researcher performs with his or her own compan

Organising an early phase of academic engagement: a case study of interactions between engineering and equestrian sports

“…Perkmann et al (2015) find that the 'independent activities' of scientistse.g., outside their university's formal channelsis an underestimated but important part of academic engagement. Barbieri et al (2018) find that creating a spin-off company has a negative effect on collaborating with industry, as measured by co-publications. Link et al (2007) find that male, tenured, and research-grant active faculty members are more likely to engage in informal technology transfer.…”

An empirical analysis of the relationship between university investments in Technology Transfer Offices and academic spin‐offs

“…Probably, during the second half of the decade, the decline in the public budget allocated to universities worsened the career prospects of young researchers and favored the creation of ASOs as a substitute for a research career in academia. The absence of a relationship concerning patents and the number of ASOs may be attributed to a ‘substitution effect’ (Barbieri et al, 2018), because ASOs and patents can represent alternative ways of transferring research results to the market 8…”

Academic Engagement: A Review of the Literature 2011-2019

“…To estimate the effect of collaboration on the scientific production of research groups, Garcia et al (2020) use a difference-in-differences approach with propensity score matching. To explore the existence of substitution effects between different forms of technology transfer, Barbieri et al (2018) match academic entrepreneurs with similar non-enterprising colleagues, to prevent an overestimation of the impact of entrepreneurship on scientific productivity. Lawson et al (2019) for their analysis of the impact of nationality on engagement, use semi-parametrically matched samples of foreign and domestic born academics.…”

“…Johnson et al (2017) find that it has no effect on academic engagement -in their words "informal commercialisation" -intention amongst STEM academics in Scottish universities. Using a different measure for entrepreneurship, Barbieri et al (2018) determine that in Italy co-publishing with their own firm reduces academics' copublications with other firms. This suggests founding a firm may compete with industry collaboration.…”