Academic Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurial Advisors and Their Advisees' Outcomes

The transfer of complex knowledge and skills is difficult, often requiring intensive interaction and extensive periods of co-working between a mentor and mentee, which is particularly true in apprenticeship-like settings and on-the-job training. This paper studies a context that quintessentially describes this type of learning: the academic lab. I focus on ways a change in the attention of a principal investigator—moving to entrepreneurship—may influence knowledge transmission and skill development by examining the relationship of this change with their PhD students' scientific productivity and careers. To do so, I rely on novel restricted-access data encompassing faculty and PhD students in computer sciences, engineering, and the life sciences who were active at an elite US research university 2001–2017. The results suggest a substantial negative association between a professor's entrepreneurial activity and the short- as well as long-run publication output of the PhD students they train. Furthermore, I detect a decrease in students' likelihood of becoming professors themselves, but also an increase in their likelihood of working for consulting firms upon graduation. Finally, I provide evidence suggesting that changes in trainee development are the most feasible drivers of the results rather than changes in trainee research orientation, selection or life cycle effects.