What Do Scientists Want: Money or Fame?

Scientists carry out the tasks of education, research, and commercial activities (the so-called third task) at universities. Despite their importance, the roles, motivations, and perceptions of university inventors have been relatively neglected topics of study. Most studies on university-industry relations have hitherto focused on a few selected elite universities, technology transfer offices (TTOs), patent legislations, or technology transfer activities in specific sectors from the United States. In these studies, the focus of interest is primarily the importance of institutions (patent legislation, policymechanisms) and organizations (TTOs, university administration) in the patenting activities of scientists (see recent reviews by Siegel & Phan, 2005; Rothaermel et al., 2007; Göktepe, 2008). Some studies initiated the importance of individual oriented factors, but rather limited themselves only to entrepreneurial traits, experience, scientific background, and demographic factors such as age in order to analyze commercialization motives of scientists. A number of studies (Gulbrandsen, 2004; Giuri et al., 2007; Meyer, 2005; Azoulay et al., 2007; Baldini et al., 2007; Bercovitz & Feldman, 2008) have recently paid attention to the roles of individual inventors in the university-industry technology transfer or academic entrepreneurship. In line with these recent developments, this research aims to focus on three factors of interest; namely, scientists’ internal factors (e.g., human and scientific capital), external factors (directors – research group leader behavior, spin-offs at the institute), and psychological factors (perceptions, motivations). Within the scope of this paper we specifically focus on the relationship between the likelihood of scientists’ patenting and inventing behaviors and their perception and presumptions on the benefits (measured in terms of financial benefits and/or scientific reputation) of commercial activities. We control for different socio-demographic as well as institutional factors and scientific fields in our analysis.