Knowledge Flows from Invention to Public Value: the Impacts of Academic-industry Collaborations

An important national policy motivation for the public support of academicscientific research is the economic benefits gathered from the development of new innovations and technological progress. As academic scientists are the primary recipient of federal funding and produce key new knowledge, it is important to understand how they make decisions about their research activities and involvement with industry and how these decisions impact knowledge creation and diffusion. Knowledge flows, the dispersion of ideas between individuals or groups, contribute economic benefits by generating new innovations and technological processes and connections between scientists from different fields and industries. I have three questions on this topic that are addressed in my five-chapter dissertation: 1. How do the academic-industry patenting collaborations influence knowledge flows as measured by patent citations? 2. How do patent network structure and composition impact patent citations? 3. How do institutional logics influence academic scientists’ decisions to undertake research topics, collaboration partners and other activities to produce patents? Essay one investigates characteristics of academic-industry collaborations that influence patent citation counts using a 2010 National Survey on Intellectual Property in Academic Science and Engineering matched with 2019 citation data. Essay two expands on the first essay by looking at how network collaborations span the public and private sectors, to see how the combination of the two sectors matters for knowledge flows. The study uses the same survey data merged with patent citation and new network information data. Essay three utilizes institutional logics as a theoretical lens to look at how academic scientists make decisions about their research activities. I interview early career scientists and tenured scientists across three Arizona universities to learn more about how institutional logics present and interact in academic science. Taken together, the findings expand previous research on academic-industry interactions by highlighting the fundamental collaboration and network characteristics that improve citation counts, my metric for understanding knowledge flows. Additionally, my dissertation dives deeper into academic scientists’ research and collaboration decisions using an institutional logics perspective to better understand which decision parameters matter the most for maximizing knowledge flows.