Harnessing Academic Science for Corporate Technology: Interpersonal Networks and Absorptive Capacity

If firms conduct less scientific research internally and yet increasingly rely on science for innovation, how do they gain access to external scientific knowledge? To examine the role of interpersonal networks among corporate inventors and academic scientists in facilitating scientific knowledge transfer from academia to industry, we construct a social network encompassing nearly the entire population of life science academic scientists and corporate inventors listed on U.S. patents. To isolate the influence of interpersonal connections from the inherent characteristics and commercial potential of scientific discoveries, we leverage paper twins—scientific papers with nearly identical findings published around the same time by independent academic teams—and analyze their citations in corporate patents. Although academic science is often viewed as a public good, our findings highlight the role of close interpersonal connections—within two degrees of separation—in harnessing academic science for corporate innovation. Moreover, corporate inventors’ ability to leverage these connections depends critically on their own active engagement in scientific research as well as the alignment of their scientific expertise with the academic knowledge they seek to integrate.