The Effect of Public Knowledge Transfer Programs on Scientific Production

Abstract

We quantify the impact of publicly funded science-industry co-development programs on the production of science. These programs encourage firms to co-develop innovation projects alongside scientists, combining attributes from competitive funding programs and science commercialisation programs. Whereas traditional commercialisation programs only require scientists to reallocate efforts after a discovery is made, these programs already require such shifts in the research stage. We investigate the impact of one such program, Eurostars, on the quantity, quality, and direction of the research performed by involved scientists. To identify the causal effect of being granted funding, we make use of external variation in funding decisions driven by restrictions in Eurostar’s funding allocation rules. We find generally positive results. After receiving funding, scientists in the Eurostars programme produce similar amounts of scientific outputs, but at higher quality. Shifts in scientist’s research topics, as documented by the introduction of new keywords and text-based similarity measures, remain small. These effects seem to be driven by the more intense exchange between scientific and industrial partners: further analyses exclude pure resource or network effects as alternative explanations to these effects.