Torn between Academic Publications and University–Industry Collaboration

Abstract

University–industry collaboration (UIC) has grown so rapidly recently that the research resources embedded in universities are shared with external actors in more diversified applications. Researchers have discussed the importance of UIC, showing that UIC facilitates knowledge flows and creates more opportunities for new inventions or innovative research. However, when universities target high performance on both academic research and UIC commercial activities, academic researchers face pressure in balancing their efforts between academic research and technological applications. This study collects researcher-level data from National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST), one of the top science and technology universities in Taiwan. By observing researchers’ performance in NTUST, we explore the role of personal tech-oriented capabilities, UIC involvement, and institutional UIC atmosphere. The data include information from 323 research faculties during 2007–11. The results show that technological capabilities positively impact personal academic performance, particularly for researchers with little external social capital. The institutional UIC culture can also be a resource that helps both experienced and inexperienced academic researchers strengthen their performance on academic work. The U-I cooperation in academic works is also a positive stimulus on their personal academic performance, while UIC project collaboration only positively impacts researchers with diversified UIC connections. However, researchers working with different UIC projects have to utilize different resources to strengthen personal academic performance.