Bridging Academia and Industry: How Geographic Hubs Connect University Science and Corporate Technology
研究发现地理枢纽通过提供更高质量、更应用性的学术发现，并吸引企业（尤其是年轻创新型企业）的关注，促进学术科学向企业技术的流动，同时扩展了学术科学的地理覆盖范围。
Innovative firms rely increasingly on academic science, yet they exploit only a small fraction of all academic discoveries. Which discoveries in academia do firms build upon? We posit that hubs play the role of bridges between academic science and corporate technology. Tracking citations from patents to approximately 10 million academic articles, we find that hubs facilitate the flow of academic science into corporate inventions in two ways. First, hub-based discoveries in academia are of higher quality and are more applied. Second, firms—in particular young, innovative, science-oriented ones—pay disproportionate attention to hub-based discoveries. We address concerns regarding unobserved heterogeneity by confirming the role of firms’ attention to hub-based science in a set of 147 simultaneous discoveries. Importantly, hubs not only facilitate localized knowledge flow but also extend the geographic reach of academic science, attracting the attention of distant firms. This paper was accepted by Ashish Arora, entrepreneurship and innovation.