Academia–industry collaboration, intellectual property rights enforcement, and scientific performance: evidence from Chinese Academy of Sciences

Abstract Public research institutes (PRIs) are an important part of the academic research world and also tasked with collaborating with industry to contribute to knowledge economics. This raises conflicts between disseminating public knowledge and appropriating through secrecy or intellectual property. However, there is little empirical evidence on the effect of PRIs’ academia–industry collaboration on scientific performance. Our research fills this gap by providing an empirical analysis at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Based on a newly compiled dataset about CAS, this study explores the effect of academia–industry collaboration on scientific performance and the moderating role of intellectual property rights (IPR) enforcement. The empirical results reveal that there is an inverse U-shaped relationship between academia–industry collaboration and scientific performance and IPR enforcement steepens this curvilinear relationship. These findings suggest that policymakers should be mindful of possible adverse consequences for scientific performance and strengthen the IPR enforcement, when encouraging academia–industry collaboration.