Search

Background: Responsiveness to citizens as users of technological innovation helps motivate translational research and commercial engagement among academics. Yet, retaining citizen trust and support for research encourages caution in pursuit of commercial science., Objectives: We explore citizen expectations of the specifically academic nature of commercial science [i.e. academic entrepreneurship (AE)] and the influence of conflict of interest concerns, hopes about practical benefits and general beliefs., Design, Setting and Participants: We conducted a cross-sectional national opinion survey of 1002 Canadians online in 2010., Results: Approval of AE was moderate (mean 3.2/5, SD 0.84), but varied by entrepreneurial activity. Concern about conflict of interests (COI) was moderate (mean 2.9/5, SD 0.86) and varied by type of concern. An ordinary least-squares regression showed that expectations of practical benefits informed support for AE, specifically that academic-industry collaboration can better address real-world problems; conflict of interest concerns were insignificant., Conclusions: These findings suggest that citizens support AE for its potential to produce practical benefits, but enthusiasm varies and is reduced for activities that may prioritize private over public interests. Further, support exists despite concern about COI, perhaps due to trust in the academic research context. For user engagement in research priority setting, these findings suggest the need to attend to the commercial nature of translational science. For research policy, they suggest the need for governance arrangements for responsible innovation, which can sustain public trust in academic research, and realize the practical benefits that inform public support for AE., (© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Purpose: To quantify and compare the preferences of researchers and laypeople in Canada regarding the outcomes of basic biomedical research., Method: In autumn 2010, the authors conducted a cross-sectional, national survey of basic biomedical researchers funded by Canada's national health research agency and a representative sample of Canadian citizens to assess preferences for research outcomes across five attributes using a discrete choice experiment. Attributes included advancing scientific knowledge (assessed by published papers); building research capacity (assessed by trainees); informing decisions in the health products industry (assessed by patents); targeting economic, health, or scientific priorities; and cost. The authors reduced a fractional factorial design (18 pairwise choices plus an opt-out option) to three blocks of six. They also computed part worth utilities, differences in predicted probabilities, and willingness-to-pay values using nested logit models., Results: Of 3,260 potential researchers, 1,749 (53.65% response rate) completed the questionnaire, along with 1,002 citizens. Researchers and citizens prioritized high-quality scientific outcomes (papers, trainees) over other attributes. Both groups disvalued research targeted at economic priorities relative to health priorities. Researchers granted a premium to proposals targeting scientific priorities., Conclusions: Citizens and researchers fundamentally prioritized the same outcomes for basic biomedical research. Notably, they prioritized traditional scientific outcomes and disvalued the pursuit of economic returns. These findings have implications for how academic medicine assigns incentives and value to basic health research and how biomedical researchers and the public may jointly contribute to setting the future research agenda.