Bridging academia and industry: how geographic hubs connect university science and corporate technology

Innovative firms rely increasingly on academic science, yet they exploit only a small fraction of all academic discoveries. Which discoveries in academia do firms build upon? We posit that hubs play the role of bridges between academic science and corporate technology. Tracking citations from patents to approximately 10 million academic articles, we find that hubs facilitate the flow of academic science into corporate inventions in two ways. First, hub-based discoveries in academia are of higher quality and are more applied. Second, firms—in particular young, innovative, science-oriented ones—pay disproportionate attention to hub-based discoveries. We address concerns regarding unobserved heterogeneity by confirming the role of firms’ attention to hub-based science in a set of 147 simultaneous discoveries. Importantly, hubs not only facilitate localized knowledge flow but also extend the geographic reach of academic science, attracting the attention of distant firms.http://10.0.5.7/mnsc.2019.3385Published versio

When Collaboration Bridges Institutions: The Impact of University–Industry Collaboration on Academic Productivity

Prior research suggests that academic scientists who collaborate with firms may experience lower publication rates in their collaborative lines of work due to industry’s insistence on intellectual property protection through patenting or secrecy. In contrast, we posit that university–industry collaboration can sometimes foster specialization and boost academic contribution to open science. Specifically, research lines with both scientific and commercial potential (i.e., in Pasteur’s quadrant) provide an opportunity for a productive division of tasks between academic scientists and their industry counterparts, whereby the former focus on exploiting the scientific opportunities and the latter focus on the commercial ones. The main empirical challenge of examining this proposition is that research projects that involve industry collaborators may be qualitatively different from those that do not. To address this issue, we exploit the occurrence of simultaneous discoveries where multiple scientists make roughly the same discovery around the same time. Following a simultaneous discovery, we compare the follow-on research output of academic scientists who collaborated with industry on the discovery with that of academic scientists who did not. We find that academic scientists with industry collaborators produced more follow-on publications and fewer follow-on patents than did academic scientists without industry collaborators. This effect is particularly salient when the research line has important commercial implications and when the industry partner is an established firm

Rotation and contraction of native and regenerated cellulose fibers upon swelling and dissolution: the role of morphological and stress unbalances

The authors are grateful to the publisher, Springer, for letting the manuscript being archived in this Open Access repository. The final publication is available at http://www.springerlink.comInternational audienceUpon swelling and dissolution, native cellulose fibers such as cotton hairs or wood fibers are rotating and contracting. Regenerated cellulose fibers are only contracting, not rotating. Cotton hairs show two rotation mechanisms, a well known untwisting, not seen in wood fibers, due to the unwinding of the twists initially induced by the desiccation that occurs at the end of the growth, and a "microscopic rotation" that can also be slightly observed in wood fibers. In addition to these rotation mechanisms, cotton hairs and wood fibers show a rolling up of their primary wall that is due to the higher elongation of the external layers as compared to the internal layers arising during the elongation phase of the cell. Contraction originates from the fact that the cellulose chains are in an extended conformational state due to the spinning process for the regenerated fibers and to the bio-deposition process for native fibers. The contraction is related to the relaxation of the mean conformation of cellulose chains from an extended state to a more condensed state. Physical as well as mechanical modeling will support the experimental observations

Injection of thermoset foam: comparison between simulation and experiment

International audienceThe quality (cellular homogeneity, mechanical properties) of polyurethane foam's structures mainly depends on the manufacturing process, during which two concomitant (principal) exothermic chemical reactions take place: the first one creates CO2 into the fluid matrix (germination of bubbles, expansion and coarsening of the foam) and the second one leads to the polymerization. In order to validate a model developed at CEMEF, an original experiment (RheoFoam System) has been created. It consists in an instrumented injection mould (closed or opened cylindrical cavity) in which the viscoelastic foam inflates. It allows measuring simultaneously the evolution of some technological parameters (the rise of the foam, the pressure distribution on the bottom of the mould and the temperature evolution inside the foam) which are a macroscopic signature of the evolution of the cellular microstructure. These temperature and pressure fields are then compared to those obtained using the numerical simulation. The results are discussed

La nature, point d’ancrage et de gravité de l’œuvre littéraire de Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937)

Le présent article met en évidence le rôle central, et paradoxal, que joue la nature dans l’œuvre poétique de l’écrivain yiddish Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937). Il part du constat que la littérature yiddish moderne, depuis Mendele Moykher Sforim (1835-1917), a construit un rapport unique au monde naturel. Celui-ci, constituant l’envers du shtetl et de sa culture, était traditionnellement associé aux non-Juifs. Il a donc fait l’objet d’un effort d’appropriation passant par une idéalisation et une judaïsation du spectacle de la nature. S’opposant à cette tendance d’une façon originale, Moyshe Kulbak crée un mythe nouveau, foncièrement irréaliste, celui des « Juifs de la Nature », dont il s’affirme le descendant. En nous appuyant sur les œuvres poétiques de l’auteur, et en particulier sur son long poème Raysn [Biélorussie], nous analysons les conditions de possibilité d’un tel mythe : il s’agit non plus de judaïser la nature mais, paradoxalement, de déjudaïser les Juifs, de les plonger, autant que faire se peut, dans l’environnement non juif que reste fondamentalement la campagne de la région natale de l’auteur, la Biélorussie. D’où la création, à la fois moderniste et lyrique, de figures détachées du temps pour pouvoir être plongées dans le sol : chefs de tribu, paysans, bergers, bandits, promeneurs qui n’ont plus de juif que leur nom et leur langue. Mais là est l’essentiel : l’écrivain yiddish est bien conscient qu’il ne peut se détacher de sa langue et de sa culture et ses « Juifs de la Nature » sont montrés dans toute leur irréalité, et souvent pétris de réminiscences nationales, qu’elles soient littéraires ou bibliques.This paper analyzes the central, yet paradoxical, role Nature plays in the poetic work of Yiddish writer Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937). It takes its departure from the assessment of the particular relationship Modern Yiddish writers have towards Nature since Mendele Moykher Sforim (1835-1917). Nature is the opposite of the shtetl and of its culture. It was traditionally associated with non-Jews. The pioneers of Modern Yiddish literature have thus been obliged to take hold of Nature by idealizing and judaizing it. Moyshe Kulbak opposed this tendency in a very original way: he created a new myth, a wholly unrealistic one, which, following the critic Zalmen Rayzen (1887-1941), I have labelled as the myth of “Nature Jews”. And Kulbak presented himself as their offspring. I have centered my study on Kulbak’s poems, in particular on his long piece Raysn [Belarus] and have proposed a detailed analysis of this myth and of the reasons it was invented. Instead of judaizing Nature as his predecessors had done, Kulbak paradoxically tends to unjudaize Jews in order to fuse them with their non-Jewish environment, with the landscapes of his native region, Western Belarus. For this reason, in his modernist and lyrical verses, he creates characters who are detached from Time in order to be better anchored in the Place of their birth : leaders of tribes, peasants, shepherds, bandits or mere walkers, they do not have anything Jewish anymore except for their name and for their language. But this point is crucial: the Yiddish writer is well aware that he cannot take his distance from his language and culture and his “Nature Jews” are shown as unrealistic beings and remain, more often than not, imbued with national references, be they biblical or literary

Made in academia: the effect of institutional origin on inventors' attention to science

Inventors cannot exploit new scientific discoveries if they do not pay attention to them. However, allocating attention to science is difficult because the scientific literature is vast, fast-changing, and often unreliable. Inventors are therefore likely to rely on informational cues when screening new publications. I posit that inventors pay significantly less attention to discoveries “made in academia” than to those “made in industry” because they believe that the work of academic scientists will be less useful to them. I test this proposition by examining inventors’ patent references to the scientific literature in the case of simultaneous discoveries made by at least one team based in academia and another based in industry. I find that inventors are 23% less likely to cite the academic paper than its twin from industry. My results highlight the importance of inventors’ attention as a hitherto underexplored bottleneck shaping the translation of science into new technologies

Modélisation du revêtement de matière liquide lors d'un processus de trempage - approche thermomécanique et validation expérimentale

http://hdl.handle.net/2042/15853International audienceCe papier a pour objectif de présenter les premiers essais de modélisation du procédé de trempage d'un moule cylindrique dans un bain de polymère. L'objectif est de pouvoir prédire numériquement l'épaisseur de couche liquide extraite autour du moule après sa sortie du bain. Une rhéologie anisotherme newtonienne a été utilisée dans un premier temps. Les premiers résultats obtenus ont montré que l'épaisseur extraite n'était pas constante le long du moule ; elle est maximale à l'extrémité inférieure et minimale à l'extrémité supérieure. Des problèmes d'instabilités à l'interface matière/air et de pertes de matière apparaissent, une approche d'introduction de la tension de surface sera présentée = This paper describes the modelling of the dip-coating process over a cylindrical mould which is dipped into a liquid polymer bath at a constant speed. The goal of this work is to numerically predict the thickness of the layer extracted on the mould. An anisotropic newtonian rheology is used as a first approximation. The results show that the thickness is heterogeneous along the mould: maximal at the bottom and minimal at the top. The approach of encounting of the interfacial tension liquid/air in order to avoid surface instabilities and mass loss will be also presente

Essays on the production and commercialization of new scientific knowledge

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references.Scientific research frequently generates tremendous economic value. Yet, this value tends to be elusive and public and private organizations often struggle to obtain returns from their investment in science. This dissertation, composed of three essays, examines persistent challenges to the production and commercialization of new scientific knowledge. The first essay of the dissertation describes simultaneous discoveries and their potential as a research tool for social science. It also introduces the first systematic and automated method to generate a list of such events. The resulting dataset of 578 recent simultaneous discoveries can be used to investigate a number of questions, including the impact of the discovery environment, by using them to conduct the first "twin studies" of new knowledge. As an example, the second essay investigates the relative impact of universities and firms on science-based invention by examining 39 discoveries made simultaneously in academia and in industry. As compared to universities, the results indicate that firms amplify the technological impact of new scientific knowledge. The third essay of the dissertation, coauthored with Fiona Murray and Joshua Gans, explores tradeoffs associated with collaboration in the production of new scientific knowledge. Specifically, we find that collaboration is not only associated with higher-quality output, it is also associated with lower individual productivity as well as challenges surrounding the allocation of credit. Taken together, the three essays examine important challenges associated with the production and commercialization of new scientific knowledge-thus providing insights about the drivers of economic value from public and private investment in science.by Michaël. Bikard.Ph.D

Etude numérique de l'effet de taille sur un écoulement 3D autour d'une sphère rigide suspendue dans un fluide newtonien

National audienceL'écoulement autour d'une particule sphérique rigide suspendue dans un fluide newtonien soumis à un cisaillement simple est numériquement étudié en utilisant le code éléments finis Rem3D®. Le mouvement de la sphère est imposé par un contact collant avec le fluide. L'effet de la taille de la particule par rapport à celle de la cellule de cisaillement a été étudié. Les calculs directs prouvent que la modélisation 3D est nécessaire pour prévoir correctement le comportement de la sphère. La proximité de la particule et des parois affecte fortement les vitesses, les lignes de courant et le mouvement de la sphère (augmentation de la période de rotation) et le champ de contrainte (changement d'angle d'orientation et d'augmentation des efforts locaux maximaux)