The relationship between research funding and academic consulting: An empirical investigation in the Spanish context

• We examine the relationship between types of research funding and academic consulting.
• Increasing levels of contract research will increase monetary income from consulting.
• Increasing international competitive funding decreases income from consulting.
• Competitive funding increases consulting income at high levels of contract funding.

This paper investigates the relationship between sources of funding for research activity and the engagement of scientists in a specific type of knowledge transfer, that is, academic consulting. We rely on a sample of 2603 individual scientists from five Spanish universities, who have been awarded public funding or have been principal investigators in activities contracted by external agents, over the period 1999–2004. We find that externally contracted research is positively related to the amount of monetary income from consulting contracts, but that international competitive funding has a negative effect. Our results show that this negative effect is positively moderated by the size of contract funding: the effect of international competitive funding becomes positive for moderate and high levels of contract funding. By investigating the relationship between academic consulting and different types of research funding, our paper sheds light on the conditions that favor academic consulting.