Stardom, Interdisciplinarity and distinct modes of university-industry interaction

Research on academic entrepreneurship suggests that star scientists are disproportionately involved in the exploitation of commercial opportunities that emerge from breakthrough scientific discoveries. Instead, social studies of science propose that interdisciplinary scientists are particularly well-equipped to identify novel responses that meet societal challenges. We confront these two perspectives and examine whether scientific stardom and research interdisciplinarity contribute to explain the degree of scientists’ engagement in university-industry (U-I) interactions. We develop a rationale to distinguish four stylized modes of U-I interaction - i.e. firm creation, technology transfer, co-production, and response/research services - and assess the contribution of stardom and interdisciplinarity to each mode of U-I interaction. We draw on a sample of 1,182 tenured scientists from the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), the largest public research organization in Spain, covering all fields of science. Our results suggest that the effect of stardom is contingent on the interaction mode. We find that stardom has a positive effect on firm creation, an inverted U-shape relationship with co-production and no significant relationship with technology transfer and research services. In contrast, interdisciplinary research has a strong positive impact on all four modes. Additionally, we find evidence of a substitution effect between stardom and interdisciplinarity on two modes of U-I interaction: technology transfer and co-production. High levels of interdisciplinarity have a greater impact on these two modes of U-I interaction for scientists who exhibit comparatively lower levels of stardom.