Mobility and Academic Entrepreneurship: An Empirical Analysis of Japanese Scientists

This study examines whether the mobility of university scientists enhances academic entrepreneurship at the individual level by examining scientists’ career paths. It draws on a theoretical framework concerning the factors that enable entrepreneurs to recognize opportunities. A new set of data comprising credible and wide-ranging information facilitated the empirical analyses of more than 500 scientists holding full-time positions at the University of Tokyo. First, the study distinguishes between Japanese academic entrepreneurs (AEs), who recognized the opportunities offered in Japanese academia from 1998 to 2004, and non-AEs, who did not. It then compares the career paths of AEs and non-AEs, highlighting three kinds of mobility: job mobility, sector mobility, and international mobility. The result of the probit analysis clearly shows that both job mobility and international mobility are positively related to enhanced entrepreneurship among Japanese scientists, whereas sector mobility is not. A brief discussion of the results follows. This paper concludes that mobility—the experience of moving beyond boundaries—enables Japanese scientists to access the resources, learn the skills, and acquire the entrepreneurial traits that enhance their academic entrepreneurship.