Foreign-born academic scientists and their interactions with industry: Implications for university technology commercialization and corporate innovation management

This study examines and characterizes the way foreign-born academic scientists interact with private firms. Using status characteristics theory, this inquiry explores how foreign-born tenured and tenure-track academic scientists in the
150 most research-intensive U.S. universities interact with the private sector by means of six discrete interaction modes. The study further investigates whether foreign-born academic scientists’ interactions with private firms are more of a formal or informal nature vis-à-vis those of native-born scientists’. The empirical analysis indicates that foreign-born academic scientists have lower odds of having been approached by private firms to ask about their research activities, lower odds of having served as a paid consultant to firms, and lower odds of having been engaged in the joint transfer and commercialization of technologies with private firms relative to their U.S.-born counterparts. In contrast, foreign-born academic scientists have significantly higher odds of having co-authored scientific articles with private firms than their U.S.-born counterparts. The paper discusses the implications for university technology commercialization and innovation management in firms.