Influences and Conflicts of Federal Policies in Academic–Industrial Scientific Collaboration

This paper examines the role of the federal government in shaping the relationship between academics scientists and industry. There exists a potential conflict between government policies encouraging collaboration within academia and the policies encouraging collaboration between academia and industry. To test and model these potential conflicts, this paper uses data collected in a 2004–2005 survey by the Research Valuing Mapping Project (a project based at Georgia Tech and led by Barry Bozeman) of more than 2000 academically based research scientists and engineers. The major finding in this paper shows that academic scientists working with industry collaborate more (with all types of collaborators) than those that do not collaborate with industry. However, when examining only those scientist that collaborate with industry, the results reveal a negative relationship between the amount of time spent collaborating with industry and the number of collaborators; implying that increasing collaboration with industry leads to less academic–academic collaboration.