Knowledge transfer in academia: an exploratory study on the Not-Invented-Here Syndrome

Today’s society is often claimed to be the “knowledge society”. Knowledge transfer plays a pivotal role in the whole economic system, influencing innovation management in its very core. This study deals with one of the barriers that might hamper knowledge transfer: The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome (NIH). Until now, this phenomenon was mainly analyzed in an industrial context. However, as the universities play an increasingly important role in the knowledge society, the time seems ripe to analyze this barrier of knowledge transfer in an academic context. This paper examines the influence of the research discipline, the scientific output, the attitude towards basic science and the project experience on NIH by analyzing a sample of 166 Austrian professors from the fields of physics and engineering. While we cannot find a significant impact of the first two aspects, we can demonstrate that the latter two do have a significant influence on NIH. Summing up, this study supports results from the existing literature on NIH and sheds light on new aspects providing deeper insights into the comprehension of this complex phenomenon.