Organisational mission and the involvement of academic research units in knowledge sharing with private companies

We still do not have a full understanding of how the different missions of academic organisations relate to their performance in knowledge sharing. This paper addresses this gap with a data set of more than 900 Swiss academic institutions and distinguishes between mechanisms of knowledge sharing, different levels and types of missions, and the strength of isomorphic processes. We find that the missions of organisations and fields are more important than the missions of institutes for knowledge exchange through commercialisation and teaching. The opposite is true for industrial PhD students, a research-based mechanism of knowledge exchange. Coercive and mimetic isomorphic processes in organisations and normative isomorphic processes in research areas have different effects: since commercialisation of knowledge is not the main activity in any discipline, low normative isomorphism leaves more freedom for institutes to decide how and by which mechanisms they share knowledge, which correlates positively with commercialisation performance.