Séminaire COURNOT – Michel Ferrary (Université de Genève)

Détails de l'événement :

Titre : Academic scientists’ mobility: The hidden pipe of tacit knowledge transfer from academia to industry and to its regional ecosystem

Résumé : University-industry knowledge transfer (UIKT) is critical to economic growth and contributes to the creation of regional open innovation ecosystems. Research on UIKT has mainly focused on codified knowledge. However, the vast majority of knowledge produced by academia is tacit and, in some cases, cannot be made explicit; such knowledge remains embodied in individuals and therefore requires socialization to be transferred. Building on knowledge management theory and social network theory, this article proposes that socialization occurs in two forms, weak and strong, and that strong socialization is needed for tacit UIKT. We propose that the professional mobility of PhD graduates allows for strong socialization between knowledge owners and is an alternative instrument to measure tacit UIKT. Through a database tracking the professional mobility of the PhD graduates of a large pluridisciplinary European university, our results show that some schools transfer both tacit and explicit knowledge, some only tacit knowledge, but that no school transfers exclusively explicit knowledge. We also show that alignment with national industrial specialization positively influences tacit UIKT toward the regional industrial cluster, but that this alignment effect is observed only for PhD graduates with citizenship from a European Union member country or the European Free Trade Area, which are both geographical areas of free-movement for workers. We contribute to knowledge management theory by exploring the mobility of academic scientists as a pipeline of tacit UIKT, by extending the concept of socialization from intra-organizational to inter-organizational settings, by proposing the concepts of weak and strong socialization, by demonstrating how tacit knowledge is a precondition to UIKT, and finally by showing how investigating tacit UIKT through mobility provides the opportunity to reanalyze UIKT and regional cluster research questions.

Lieu du séminaire : TBA.

Lien ZOOM : TBA.

Agenda des séminaires : https://www.beta-economics.fr//seminaires-cournot-2022-2023/