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Séminaire d’économie de Bordeaux
Jeudi 18 juin à 13h30 sur Zoom :
Riccardo Fini
« Attention to exploration: The effect of academic
entrepreneurship on the production of scientific knowledge »
(avec Markus Perkmann, Jan-Michael Ross)
Abstract: We study how becoming an entrepreneur affects an academic scientist’s research. We propose that entrepreneurship will shift the scientist’s attention away from intra-disciplinary research questions and towards new bodies of knowledge relevant for downstream technology development. This will alter the individual’s search towards greater exploration, leading them to work on topics outside their discipline. In turn, the shift towards exploration will enhance the quality of the entrepreneurial scientist’s subsequent research as concepts and models from other bodies of knowledge are combined in novel ways, resulting in more impactful work. Entrepreneurship leads to more impactful research, mediated by exploration. Using panel data on the full population of researchers at a large research university, we find support for this argument. Our study is novel in that identifies a shift of attention as the mechanism underpinning beneficial spill-over effects from founding a venture on the production of public science.