Academic Scientists: The Golden Opportunity For High-Tech Companies

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, it provides further knowledge about profitability of industry scientific publications as it is not clear yet whether industry scientific publications are profitable to firms. Second, it considers the central role of academic partners in the profitability of firms’ scientific publications as previous empirical studies do not consider such role. To investigate the subject, we perform several regressions with firms profits as dependent variable. The results provide evidence that the publication of scientific articles is not a profitable activity. Collaborations with academic institutions are the real basis of profitable results; the production of scientific publications is only one of the consequences of these collaborations. This study also shows that not all collaborations are profitable, only collaborations in high-tech sectors that lead to high-quality publications lead to larger profits. Indeed, in their quest for survival and profitability, companies competing in high-tech sectors often need the help of academic partners to exploit scientific knowledge. On average, a rise of about 8% in successful collaborations (leading to high-quality publications) raises the profit of high-tech firms by about 1%.