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A growing body of research views industrial and academic science as characterized by conflicting institutional logics. However, other scholars have long claimed that stark differences between the two sectors exist in theory but not in practice. Drawing on both views and the broader organizational literature, we develop a conceptual framework to compare and contrast industrial and academic science along four interdependent dimensions: (1) the nature of work, (2) characteristics of the workplace, (3) characteristics of workers, and (4) the disclosure of research results. We then employ detailed survey data on a sample of more than 5,000 research-active life scientists and physical scientists to examine key aspects of the framework empirically. Our results suggest that the conflicting logics view tends to overstate differences across sectors while ignoring important heterogeneity within sectors. We further advance the understanding of institutional logics by examining the relationships among dimensions of science, including the degree to which differences in the nature of work explain differences in how work is organized and results are disclosed. We discuss directions for future research on the institution of science as well as implications for managers and policy makers concerned with scientific activity within and across sectors.

Scholarly work seeking to understand academics’ commercial activities often draws on abstract notions of the academic reward system and the representative scientist. Few scholars have examined whether and how scientists’ motives to engage in commercial activities differ across fields. Similarly, efforts to understand academics’ choices have focused on three self-interested motives—recognition, challenge, and money—ignoring the potential role of the desire to have an impact on others. Using panel data for a national sample of over 2,000 academics employed at U.S. institutions, we examine how the four motives are related to commercial activity measured by patenting. We find that all four motives are correlated with patenting, but these relationships differ systematically between the life sciences, physical sciences, and engineering. These field differences are consistent with differences across fields in the rewards from commercial activities as well as in the degree of overlap between traditional and commercializable research, which affects the opportunity costs of time spent away from “traditional” academic work. We discuss potential implications for policy makers, administrators, and managers as well as for future research on the scientific enterprise. This paper was accepted by Toby Stuart, entrepreneurship and innovation.

We examine gender differences among the six PhD student cohorts 2004-2009 at the California Institute of Technology using a new dataset that includes information on trainees and their advisors and enables us to construct detailed measures of teams at the advisor level. We focus on the relationship between graduate student publications and: (1) their gender; (2) the gender of the advisor, (3) the gender pairing between the advisor and the student and (4) the gender composition of the team. We find that female graduate students co-author on average 8.5% fewer papers than men; that students writing with female advisors publish 7.7% more. Of particular note is that gender pairing matters: male students working with female advisors publish 10.0% more than male students working with male advisors; women students working with male advisors publish 8.5% less. There is no difference between the publishing patterns of male students working with male advisors and female students working with female advisors. The results persist and are magnified when we focus on the quality of the published articles, as measured by average Impact Factor, instead of number of articles. We find no evidence that the number of publications relates to the gender composition of the team. Although the gender effects are reasonably modest, past research on processes of positive feedback and cumulative advantage suggest that the difference will grow, not shrink, over the careers of these recent cohorts.

A number of countries have an extremely low percentage of foreign scientists studying or working in the country. Particularly notable is the virtual absence of foreign scientists studying or working in India, Italy (3.0%), Japan (5.0%), Brazil (7.1%) and Spain (7.3%).

National incentive policies relate to increases in research article submissions and publications in Science . Many national governments have implemented policies providing incentives for researchers to publish, especially in highly ranked international journals. Although still the top publishing nation, the United States has seen its share of publications decline from 34.2% in 1995 to 27.6% in 2007 as the number of articles published by U.S. scientists and engineers has plateaued and that of other countries has grown ( 1 , 2 ). Hicks ( 3 ) argues that the two events are not unrelated: The decline in the relative performance of the United States relates to increased international competition engendered by newly adopted incentives that have crowded out some work by U.S. authors.

This study investigates the impact of information technology (IT) on productivity and collaboration patterns in academe. Our data combine information on the diffusion of two noteworthy innovations in IT-BITNET and the Domain Name System (DNS)-with career-history data on research-active life scientists. We analyzed a random sample of 3,114 research-active life scientists from 314 U.S. institutions over a 25-year period and find that the availability of BITNET on a scientist's campus has a positive effect on his or her productivity and collaborative network. Our findings also support the hypothesis of a differential effect of IT across subgroups of the scientific labor force. Women scientists and those working at nonelite institutions benefit more from the availability of IT in terms of overall research output and an increase in the number of new coauthors they work with than do men or individuals at elite institutions. These results suggest that IT is an equalizing force, providing a greater boost to productivity and more collaboration opportunities for scientists who are more marginally positioned in academe.

[...]big labs can be wasteful - an analysis by the US National Institute of General Medical Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, found that an increase in funding is not associated with a substantial increase in output when measured by the number of grant-linked publications5. [...]the building boom is now costing the scientific enterprise by creating excess space that cannot be paid for. [...]rules should be altered to limit the amount of interest payments universities can include when calculating indirect rates, and the amount of faculty members' salaries that can be charged to grants, thereby dulling the incentive to hire people for soft-money positions. New drugs are slower in coming to market and there was a less than stellar increase in US publications associated with the NIH doubling7. [...]many of the breakthroughs that have contributed to better health outcomes have come from other fields of science - such as the laser and magnetic resonance imaging.

The relationship between science and economic growth is quantified in terms of payoff and lag structure. A better understanding of how science relates to growth is achieved, as a result of two threads of research coming together. One demonstrates that firms benefit from knowledge spillovers. The other suggests that knowledge spillovers are the source of growth and that these spillovers are endogenous. Although the authors of the new growth economics focus on the role that the R&D activities of firms play in this spillover process (both as creator of spillovers and recipient of spillovers), a good case can be made that research in the nonprofit sector spills over and has endogenous elements that are set in motion by profit seeking behavior. Economists have examined how a priority-based reward system provides incentives for scientists to behave in socially beneficial ways. In particular, it can be demonstrated that the reward of priority encourages the production and sharing of knowledge and thus goes a long way toward solving the appropriability dilemma inherent in the creation of the public good knowledge.