Academic entrepreneurship is an important way to promote technological innovation through academic research. Nevertheless, existing literature focuses on the impact of academic entrepreneurship on academic entrepreneurship and is insufficient to systematically analyze how academic entrepreneurship affects academic research performance. Pasteur Quadrant reveals that industrial application can inspire the output of basic research; nevertheless, the mechanism of use-inspired basic research (Pasteur Quadrant) is still left inside the black box to some extent and has not been truly revealed.
This article employs a case study based on grounded theory to delineate three channels through which academic entrepreneurship promotes academic performance. The first channel is overcoming path dependence in the progress of scientific research. In this channel, the inspirations arising from practice-based activities inspire scientists to transfer methodological paradigms across fields, keep open-minded to data that is abnormal to theoretical predictions, and combine heterogeneous perspectives to redefine research questions. For academic entrepreneurs, as part of applied research projects, experiments may lead to abnormal or unexpected results, which require new scientific theories to explain and stimulate new research approaches. Alternatively, the instruments or tools developed or used in commercial research projects may provide opportunities to explore new research pathways.
The second channel is to replenish the research team with complementary resources (e.g., sustainable financial resources, high-performance experimental platforms, teammates with diversified skillsets) through academic entrepreneurship activities. The knowledge search ability formed by the academic training of scientists has a positive impact on enterprise innovation, and cooperation between university scientists and enterprises may also provide differentiated "downstream" research resources and capabilities. Academic entrepreneurship activities are accompanied by a leap from research networks to industrial networks, and there is an integrated innovation model with a focus on resource complementarity in the cooperation between innovation networks. The external environment is an open system containing resources. When the internal resources of a research team are unable to meet the needs of high performance, it is necessary to break the boundaries of the organization and absorb complementary resources from external cooperative networks (including cooperative enterprises).
The third channel is activated through novel theoretical construction processes; specifically, bisociative theoretical construction is a salient process. The commercialization of technology information is a novel input for subject knowledge production, but it has been validated in the field of technology and has a certain degree of robustness, making it more likely to bring useful and valuable (rather than random) novelty to the research agenda. Scientists may obtain appropriate models or methods from the field of technological commercialization and apply this knowledge to disciplinary knowledge production. The bisociation of theoretical construction relies on the existence of appropriate triggers, domain knowledge, and creative skills. The experience of academic entrepreneurship is a trigger that prepares scientists with the skills to commercialize technology, creating opportunities for borrowing theories, concepts, models, data, and technologies from new fields and facilitating the transfer of novel knowledge among independent fields.
The research also finds that the integration of dual roles (academic self-concept and entrepreneurial self-concept) is an antecedental condition for achieving high academic performance. Academic entrepreneurs not only need to deal with the disadvantages of new entrants but also must address the legitimacy issues brought about by "role switching" because of the transformation of identity. New institutionalism emphasizes the constraints of the institutional environment (including formal institutions, informal institutions, and institutional implementation) on the subject of behavior. Only when the behavioral subject conforms to the expectations, norms, and standards of the institutional environment can it have legitimacy, thereby improving the ability to obtain resources from the environment and generating differentiated efficiency. There are differences in norms, values, beliefs, and practices between academia and industry, which may lead to conflicts of legitimacy. Scientists need to balance the legitimacy pressure brought about by different institutional norms in universities and enterprises (such as research rigor and practical relevance) to achieve scientific research achievements and academic entrepreneurship performance. The research results can inspire researchers to extract and study major scientific problems from practice, thus promoting the coordination and formation of collaborative research models among basic research, applied research, technology development, and other related projects.