Scientific Imprints, Commercial Footprints: The Paradox of Resources in Prod. of Science & Scientist

Abstract

How do universities contribute to the economy? Despite elaborate efforts in policy and practice, academic research institutions struggle to fully realize their contribution to economically-relevant innovation. And the public is short changed in gaining access to the kinds of metrics that truly reflect the myriad of ways that academic science contributes to the economy. Doctoral recipients represent a vital role in the economy, by populating the scientific workforce, facilitating the transfer of technical and tacit knowledge among industry, government, and academia, and replenishing the intellectual stock of universities. And yet, our performance metrics reflecting university contributions to the economy largely overlook the production of scientists, which is arguably our most important source of technology transfer. Our current technology transfer metrics, either by design or in use, do little to acknowledge the people, practices, and relationships that are so critical to universities’ contributions to the economy. Furthermore, whereas the conditions for innovation, commercialization, and publication of science are well-studied, the conditions for the cultivation of scientists remains black boxed. We contend that the academic enterprise has ready access to a wealth of information to gauge their own standing, communicate their contributions to the public, and even improve local institutional performance with potentially less controversial, one-size-fits-all interventions. Policy and practice, however, have not made use of these data as much as they could. The challenge for academic institutions resides with how performance is measured or analyzed than what contributions academics make to the economy. We examine productivity among 1,205 scientists affiliated with Stanford University Medical School over a 16-year period in terms of 5 forms of scientific output, including (1) scholarly publications, (2) doctoral students, (3) participation on doctoral committees, (4) invention disclosures, and (5) licenses obtained from innovation disclosures. While science and commerce may go hand-in-hand between publications, and inventions, the relationship between corporate grants and other forms of scientific production is less clear. We find that the number and total size of corporate awards a scientist receives is associated with neither disclosure nor publication. Furthermore, the number of corporate awards has a negative association with doctoral student advising and committee membership, yet a positive association with successful licensing.