Scientists as entrepreneurs – how does commercialization affect science?

Academics are increasingly engaging in own efforts to commercialize and profit from their research results. Yet, the effects of these trends on the scientific community are underexplored. This project will add to our understanding of the effects of commercialization involvement on the pace and direction of academic scientific research. While the literature has demonstrated that patenting by academic scientists frequently raises their own scientific output in the short run, we will add evidence on its long-term effects through analysis of the direction of science in publication patterns, citation patterns, and fields of research through keyword analysis and journal publication choices. For this analysis, we will construct individual-level matched data on commercialization activity (patents granted, patents transferred), scientific activity (publications, citations), and employment (university and department location, field of science, wages, part-time and full-time outside employment, outside business income, firms owned and operated) by all university researchers for the period 1990 to 2013 in one country, and make use of state-of-the-art econometric tools to handle endogeneity problems typical for this field of investigation.