Who Do Scientists in Public Research Institutions Cooperate with Private Firms?

Abstract

As public research institutions are increasingly pressured to transfer research results to industry, evaluation of their performance is not only based on their scientific output but also on their commercialization success. Although it is well known that research cooperation activities are an important channel of knowledge transfer, the knowledge about factors driving research cooperation is limited. This paper explicitly focuses on scientist perspective and investigates the relevance of academic values and perceived costs and benefits of cooperation for a scientist's decision to cooperate with private firms. Our analysis is based on two survey waves performed with scientists in the Max Planck Society in Germany which is a publicly funded research organization focusing on basic research. Our empirical results suggest that open science identity is an important determinant of scientist fundamental decision to cooperate with private firms at all. The decision to keep on cooperating with private firms is directly influenced by cost sharing incentives and by firms' confidentiality requirements. Besides these direct effects, our results suggest that perceived reputational reward, monetary benefits, and time costs associated with cooperation influence cooperation behavior indirectly through their impact on the attractiveness of cooperation. The latter is a strong and robust predictor of cooperation behavior.