1Locked into the ivory tower? Mobility and entrepreneurship among Swedish academics1

Even though European research universities have become more active in commercialization efforts in recent decades, they have been claimed to lack the entrepreneurial dynamism of their American counterparts. Sweden differs from the majority of European countries by an unusually high intensity in trade, and by firms investing usually much in business research and development. Recently, its university system has been found to be as productive in patenting as the American in terms of share of patents where academics are involved. Yet, Sweden shares a common feature of many European economies which is that levels of entrepreneurship are much lower than in the American economy. This paper contributes to this discussion by providing new evidence on how academics in Sweden interact with the rest of the economy. This is done by examining mobility of individuals to other firms and by looking at whether they move to start-ups using register data on Swedish individuals. In particular, labour mobility has in recent years been pointed out to be an important mechanism behind knowledge spillovers and the extent that academics move to other sectors, and individuals move to this sector, is therefore of great interest to policy makers. In addition, new firms are venues where new ideas can be transformed into economic results. The economy is divided into five sectors and a comparison is made on data from 2000-2001 and 2004-2005. The variation in mobility and entrepreneurship among individuals is further examined for patterns in how and if individual characteristics can account for mobility and entrepreneurship levels