Impacts of inter-institutional mobility on scientific performance from research capital and social capital perspectives

Industries have gradually relied on basic scientific research and discovery in academia to produce innovative products and enhance innovation capabilities. This division of labor has promoted researchers’ mobility from academic research institutions to enterprises ( aca.ind mobility), especially in the artificial intelligence domain. However, limited research has been conducted to explore the impact of aca.ind mobility on the researchers’ performance in this domain. The findings elucidate the motivation and necessary conditions of researchers’ aca.ind mobility in this domain based on bibliometric methods, propensity score matching (PSM), and regression analysis methods. The results also demonstrate the impact of this type of mobility on researchers’ performance compared to mobility between academic research institutions ( aca.aca mobility) from a research capital perspective and social capital perspective. The results of this paper indicate that researchers in this domain need to accumulate more research publications and establish collaborative relationships with corporate researchers and high-impact researchers within a short academic age timeline to maximize the opportunities for aca.ind mobility. Furthermore, compared with the aca.aca mobility, which allows researchers to accumulate more research capital, aca.ind mobility seems to be more conductive to the accumulation of social capital. The aca.ind mobility not only helps researchers expand the scale of their scientific collaborative networks, but also establish collaborative relationships with more high-impact researchers. This research can help researchers plan their own career development. The results also provide suggestions for policy makers to formulate policies on talent recruitment, structure optimization, and evaluation of knowledge and innovation systems.