Recent research on innovation and entrepreneurship has emphasized inter‐organizational knowledge flows and has offered special attention to the role of universities in these knowledge networks. But, most studies have neither measured actual knowledge flows, instead relying on patents and/or alliances to serve as proxies, nor provided adequate theoretical justifications or empirical evidence for how and why knowledge diffusion processes of universities might differ from those of firms. To address these issues, I compare diffusion mechanisms and patterns for select university‐ versus firm‐origin technologies in biotechnology and digital audio. I draw upon a database that I constructed of more than 10,000 publications and patents, along with 220 interviews and several hundred pages of archival materials. The results highlight the central role of inter‐personal – over inter‐organizational – networks in enabling the diffusion of knowledge and in shaping how individual researchers in each organizational context respond to the competing demands of public science and private science. [ - ]

Recent research on innovation and entrepreneurship has emphasized inter‐organizational knowledge... [ + ]