In good company: : The influence of peers on industry engagement by academic scientists

By Valentina Tartari, Markus Perkmann, Ammon J. Salter. 2012

182 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Previous research on academic entrepreneurship and engagement with industry has found that the behaviour of academics is influenced by their local social context. However, we know little about the mechanisms that produce this effect. We argue that academic scientists’ industry engagement is influenced significantly by the behaviour of their peers, that is, the behaviour of colleagues of similar seniority. Using insights from social psychology, we hypothesize that these peer effects are produced by the mechanism of social comparison. In an analysis of data from multiple sources for 1370 UK academic scientists and engineers, we find that peer effects are stronger for early career individuals and weaker for star scientists, suggesting the incidence of social comparison. We argue that individuals look to their immediate peers for inspiration, because they view them as an important reference group and use them as a benchmark for their own ambitions and behaviours. Our findings have important implications for how universities may encourage scientists’ behaviours by paying attention to local work contexts.

Subfields: Education, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5af183c1007960b1f1040badca2f91caf5b847fe

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

Citations in the corpus

Mapping the field: a bibliometric analysis of the literature on university–industry collaborations (2017, background): “I collaborations taking account of the researchers’ social context (Lam 2011; Tartari et al. 2014).”
Conceptualizing academic entrepreneurship ecosystems: a review, analysis and extension of the literature (2018, background): “Specifically, peers potentially increase (or constrain) the propensity of their colleagues to engage with industry (Tartari et al. 2014), patent (Haeussler and Colyvas 2011; (Owen-Smith and Pow-ell 2001) and establish spinoff companies (Bergmann et al. 2016; Hayter 2011).”
Institutional determinants of university spin-off quantity and quality: a longitudinal, multilevel, cross-country study (2016, background): “One example is how scientists conform to the behavior of their heads and peers when deciding to engage in the commercialization of research (Bercovitz and Feldman 2008; Tartari et al. 2014).”
The importance of pro-social behaviour for the breadth and depth of knowledge transfer activities: an analysis of Italian academic scientists (2017, methodology): “Following recent contributions (Tartari et al., 2014; Tartari and Salter, 2015), we have built an academic engagement index that combines the two key aspects of KT breadth and depth: the variety of forms of engagement and the intensity of collaboration.13 Models 2a and 2b of Table 8 refer closely…”