Flying the nest: how the home department shapes researchers’ career paths

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2015.1076782This paper studies the importance of the socialization environment – nest – for the career destinations of early career researchers. In a sample of research groups in the fields of science and engineering at universities in Germany, we identify research orientation, output, funding as well as openness to industry and commercialization as relevant components. Nests that attract more public funding and are led by professors with high research performance are more likely to produce researchers who take jobs in public research, while links to industry predict jobs in the private sector. In a more nuanced analysis that differentiates between types of industry employment, we find that larger firms also recruit from groups with higher scientific performance, while small and medium-sized firms recruit from nests with a higher patent productivity. A focus on experimental development instead is associated with academic start-ups, and an applied focus with employment in consulting. Recommendations for research training are discussed.We thank the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) for providing the survey data and Susanne Thorwarth for help with the collection of publication and patent data. We thank participants at the ‘The Organisation, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research’ workshop organised by LEI & BRICK, Collegio Carlo Alberto, Torino (Italy) and the ‘Beyond spillovers? Channels and effects of knowledge transfer from universities’ workshop at the University of Kassel (Germany) for helpful comments. Cornelia Lawson acknowledges financial support from the Collegio Carlo Alberto under Grant ‘Researcher Mobility and Scientific Performance’ and the University of Nottingham ‘International Collaboration Fund’

Fishing for complementarities:research grants and research productivity

Academics are increasingly encouraged to acquire external grants to finance their research, and often hold grants from multiple funders concurrently to ensure the continuity of their work. However, there are concerns that inefficiencies occur when funding is received from multiple sponsors, especially when this originates from different sectors. This study investigates complementarities between public/non-profit and private sector sources of research funding with regard to academic output in terms of publications, research impact and research orientation. The empirical analysis is based on novel data on external public/non-profit research grants and industry funding for tenured engineering academics employed at fifteen UK universities. The results suggest that while research grants are generally associated with higher research outcomes, industry funding decreases the marginal utility of public/non-profit funding by lowering the increase in publication rate associated with public/non-profit grants. At the same time, for more commercially oriented research, measured as its patentability score, we find some support for complementarities between public and private-sector research funding. These results suggest that provision of public grants is crucial to the production of research that is distributed openly through publications and proceedings. Private sector grants are important as they may enable more applied research trajectories for those capable of combining publicly and industry sponsored research

International research visits and careers: An analysis of bioscience academics in Japan

This paper investigates the effect of international research visits on promotion. Research visits may help to expand existing networks and promote knowledge transfer while at the same time ensuring career stability, identified as the main barrier to mobility in Europe and Japan. Using a dataset of 370 bioscience professors in Japan we find that international research visits have a positive effect on promotion and reduce the waiting time for promotion by one year. This provides evidence that these visits also benefit a researcher’s career in the long-term. This positive research visit effect is weaker for academics who also change jobs, but stronger for inbred academics. Research visits may therefore be of specific importance for otherwise immobile academics. Further, we find that while research visits of tenured staff enhance the career by providing an early chair, postdoctoral fellowships have no lasting effect on career progression

Imprints from idea origin on innovation and the development environment

This study builds on the evolutionary and organization literatures to explore how the nature of innovation outcomes was influenced by the innovation’s original idea and the environment in which it was developed. We use data from a survey of inventors on the development processes of three types of innovations: market success innovations, technologically novel innovations, and innovations that are both technologically novel and of market success. Our results suggest that the environment in which the project is developed erodes the effect of the original knowledge sources on the innovation outcome. Specifically, a stronger imprinting effect of knowledge sources is found for independent inventors, while ideas are more likely to be eroded in projects undertaken by inventors at technology leader firms

What’s the Price of Academic Consulting? Effects of Public and Private Sector Consulting on Academic Research

Academic consulting is an important and effective means of knowledge transfer between the public and private sectors. It offers opportunities for research application but also raises concerns over potentially negative consequences for academic research and its dissemination. For a sample of social, natural, and engineering science academics in Germany, and controlling for the selection into consulting, we investigate the effect of consulting with public and private sector organizations on research performance. While previous research suggested that consulting activities might come at the cost of reduced research output, our analysis provides a more nuanced picture. Public sector consulting comes with lower average citations, particularly for junior researchers. Moreover, engagement in consulting increases the probability to cease publishing research altogether, particularly for private sector consulting. The probability of exit from academic research increases with the intensity of consulting engagement for those at the start or towards the end of their academic career and in fields for which the public–private wage gap and opportunities for engagement in duties outside academia are higher. We draw lessons for research institutions and policy about the promotion of academic consulting

What’s the Price of Academic Consulting? Effects of Public and Private Sector Consulting on Academic Research

Academic consulting is an important and effective means of knowledge transfer between the public and private sectors. It offers opportunities for research application but also raises concerns over potentially negative consequences for academic research and its dissemination. For a sample of social, natural, and engineering science academics in Germany, and controlling for the selection into consulting, we investigate the effect of consulting with public and private sector organizations on research performance. While previous research suggested that consulting activities might come at the cost of reduced research output, our analysis provides a more nuanced picture. Public sector consulting comes with lower average citations, particularly for junior researchers. Moreover, engagement in consulting increases the probability to cease publishing research altogether, particularly for private sector consulting. The probability of exit from academic research increases with the intensity of consulting engagement for those at the start or towards the end of their academic career and in fields for which the public–private wage gap and opportunities for engagement in duties outside academia are higher. We draw lessons for research institutions and policy about the promotion of academic consulting

The global rise in academic authors reporting multiple institutional affiliations reflects the unanticipated influence of research assessment on academia.

Academics reporting to be simultaneously affiliated with multiple organisations is a growing global phenomenon with significant implications for the usefulness and accuracy of research evaluations. Reporting on findings from a new study, Hanna Hottenrott, Michael E. Rose and Cornelia Lawson find that much of the recent rise in multiple author affiliation can be linked to research assessment regimes introduced in the mid-2000s.They suggest this highlights a significant gap in our understanding of how research assessment regimes, both assess and construct academic practices