Academic-Business Cooperations in Biotechnology: Who Cooperates with Firms, and Why?

Academic scientists are under increasing pressure to engage in more commercially"relevant" research, through either patenting and licensing research results, or research cooperations. This paper seeks to add to our understanding of academic-business collaborations (contract research, joint research, and consulting) by presenting preliminary results from a novel survey of academic researchers in the life sciences in Denmark. We seek to draw a "profile" of those researchers who cooperate, and why. Expressed in a different way, we would like to determine what researcher characteristics and competencies business, in practice, demands. Both university and hospital scientists were polled. Our most surprising finding is that there is a consistent and highly significant relationship between strong publication records and cooperation, across both researcher groups, and for all forms of cooperation. Our results underline that it is important that scientists be permitted - indeed, encouraged - to continue to operate within the norms of the academic community, where success is measured by the collegiate reputation-based reward system, thereby maintaining a clear division of labor between what scientists do best, and what business does best.