Academia and industry: advancing science and technology together

Academics want to get published. Firms want to make money. When something of value in one arena isn’t as valuable in the other, what’s the incentive of working more closely together?

Michaël Bikard, Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School, believes that there are opportunities that come from those differences.

Made in academia

If you’ve ever read the ‘untold’ story of Google’s Larry Page, he went to Stanford after receiving his bachelor’s in computer science from the University of Michigan and had to make a hard choice: become an academic or build a company. The former would mean giving up the chance to become a billionaire. The latter would force him away from the knowledge frontier.

Are the two worlds really at odds?

Dr Bikard’s research, ‘Made in Academia: The Effect of Institutional Origin on Inventors’ Attention to Science’, explores how often ideas stemming from academia are adopted by innovators. The takeaway? “Inventors use scientific knowledge made in academia, but perhaps not as much as they potentially could,” he says.

While it’s true that inventors can benefit from academic knowledge, it’s also true that uncovering useful knowledge amounts to discovering a needle in the proverbial haystack. At the frontier of science, explains Dr Bikard, literature is “complex, vast, fast-changing”, and often “unreliable”.

“Inventors pay significantly less attention to discoveries made in academia than to those made in industry,” he says. Dr Bikard used a novel empirical approach. He identified 39 occasions in which at least one team from industry and another from academia were involved in the same discovery. Those “paper twins” have in principle the same level of usefulness for technology development, but inventors appeared to be 23% less likely to cite the academic paper than its industry twin.

“These results don’t stem from differences in the scientists’ abilities, their social status or their social networks. Inventors pay systematically less attention to scientific knowledge made in academia than to that made in industry.”