Reward systems and NSF university research centers: The impact of tenure on university scientists' valuation of applied and commercially relevant research

Over the past three decades, U.S. science policy(1) has shifted from decentralized support of small, investigator-initiated research projects to more centralized, block grant-based, multidisciplinary research centers. No matter one's take on the "revolutionary" nature of this shift,(2) a major consequence is that university scientists, now more than ever, are subject to multiple and often conflicting demands. The purpose of this article is to examine the impact of having tenure on university scientists' consideration of these demands, particularly the demand for applied and commercially relevant research. We are interested in scientists who work in a particular type of university research center, one previously referred to as the "multidiscipline multipurpose university research center," or MMURC (Bozeman & Boardman, 2003, 2004b). These scientists are interesting because MMURCs, at least those funded by the federal government (e.g., the National Science Foundation's Engineering Research Centers and Science and Technology Centers programs), require that scientists be tenured or occupy a tenure-track position in an academic department.