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Academic spin-off activities and research performance: the mediating role of research collaboration

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Abstract

Studies on the effect of entrepreneurial activities on scientists’ subsequent research performance have reported mixed findings. Given the misalignment between spin-off involvement and research activity, our study aims to add to the literature on academic entrepreneurship by examining this effect in a new context and testing the mediating role of research collaboration. We hypothesize that spin-off involvement fosters research collaboration between entrepreneurs and external researchers, which in turn is conducive to research performance. The empirical exercise is based on a sample of 945 scientists at 11 leading material sciences faculties in China, focusing on their spin-off involvement from 2012 to 2014 and their publication records in the following 5-year period. We find that spin-off involvement has a positive effect on individual scientists’ subsequent research excellence but does not significantly increase their research productivity. Our findings also confirm the mediating role of research collaboration (both academic–corporate and domestic cross-institutional) in the association between spin-off involvement and research performance.

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Notes

  1. By research performance, we refer to both research productivity (measured by the total number of journal publications per year) and research excellence (measured by the number of articles published in highly-cited journals per year).

  2. For comparison purposes, all of the publication measurements in this study included only journal articles, both Chinese- and English-language, and excluded other publication types, like review articles, conference papers, and so forth. Currently, scientists at leading Chinese universities mainly aim at international English journals (Yang and You 2018), which is also confirmed by our dataset. However, given that being Scopus-indexed already means a certain quality of a journal, especially for non-English journals, we did not exclude those Chinese publications or distinguish them from English publications in this study.

  3. One might wonder why the sum of the two indirect effects surpasses the total effect, but note that the two unstandardized coefficients of the mediating variables are not additive because they were separately added to the original regression model.

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Acknowledgements

Financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71503167) and the Shanghai Pujiang Talent Project (15PJC071) is gratefully acknowledged. Special thanks go to the Associate Editor and three anonymous referees who provided constructive comments and suggestions.

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  1. Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

    Huan Li

  2. School of Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    ** Yang & **nlan Cai

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Table 9 Correlation matrix (N = 945)
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Li, H., Yang, X. & Cai, X. Academic spin-off activities and research performance: the mediating role of research collaboration. J Technol Transf 47, 1037–1069 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-021-09869-y

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