A Firm Scientific Community

The paper investigates the extent to which firms participate in scientific communities’ activities and whether this facilitates the exchange and transfer of scientific knowledge to firms’ technological activities. The focus is on two modes of interactions of firms with scientific communities: the participation in and the sponsorship of international scientific conferences. In particular, the focus is on the field of computer science.

First, the results document that both conference participation and sponsorship by firms is frequent and concentrated at events of the highest quality. Even within individual conferences, firm contributions stand out in quality. Second, firms are significantly more likely to cite in their scientific articles and patents scientific articles presented at a conference which they attended relative to articles presented at comparable conferences.

To provide causal evidence, the authors use the fact that academic researchers are more likely to attend conferences whose locations they can access easier by airplane. Thus, at a conference, firms have a higher likelihood to observe research by researchers with a direct flight to that conference.

In September 2018, Felix Pöge received the EPIP Best Paper Award for Young Researchers for this paper during the EPIP 2018 Conference at the ESMT Berlin.