Researchers have found that when commercial companies publish research in a specific scientific field, it can affect the nature of discoveries made within that entire discipline. Researchers from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) and Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence analysed 11.1 million science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) papers published globally between 2000 and 2014. They wanted to understand how corporate participation affects scientific novelty or the creation of new ideas. Their study shows that, while corporate involvement increases the frequency of new ideas and broadens the scope of research, it actually reduces the likelihood of radical, curiosity-driven breakthroughs that connect vastly different concepts.
In the scientific community, innovation is often viewed as recombinant novelty, which means creating something new by combining existing pieces of knowledge in unexpected ways. The researchers utilised a massive open-source database called OpenAlex to trace these citation patterns across 1,639 different STEM fields. They measured recombinant novelty by examining the reference lists of published papers. If a paper cited a combination of two scientific journals that had never been cited together in the previous twenty years, it was flagged as a novel combination. Along with examining whether a new combination occurred, they also measured the breadth or number of new combinations, and the distance, which calculates how conceptually far apart these combined ideas were. This can mean that blending theoretical physics with marine biology has more breadth compared to blending with astrophysics, which is closely related.
By mapping the journal connections and calculating the intellectual distance between them based on past citation habits, they could objectively score the novelty of each paper. They then compared these novelty scores against the percentage of papers in that field that featured at least one author from a corporate or industry background, looking for how private participation affected novelty
By looking at the multifaceted nature of novelty, occurrence, breadth, and distance, the team found a trade-off with private research. Fields with a high industry presence produce more novel papers that combine a wide variety of ideas, likely because companies are trying to solve complex, real-world problems. However, the conceptual distance of these ideas shrinks. Industry influence tends to steer a field away from risky, blue-sky research, which is the kind of pure, curiosity-driven science that leads to dramatic leaps in human knowledge.
Interestingly, they also found that top-ranked universities were better able to resist this trend, maintaining high novelty distance even when industry presence was strong. The authors, however, note that their findings establish a strong statistical link, but cannot prove direct cause and effect.
As governments worldwide push for closer ties between universities and corporations to drive economic growth, these findings serve as a vital warning. While industry partnerships are excellent for practical problem-solving, society must also deliberately protect and fund curiosity-driven research. Striking this balance ensures we do not sacrifice the radical, world-changing discoveries of tomorrow for the practical solutions of today.
