Industry funding and university professors’ research performance

University research is to an increasing extent funded by industry, and the share of basic funding is decreasing. In the literature, there are optimistic and pessimistic views on the implication of this development. Based on data from a questionnaire study among all tenured university professors in Norway (N = 1967) we find that there is a significant relationship between industry funding and research performance: professors with industrial funding describe their research as applied to a greater extent, they collaborate more with other researchers both in academia and in industry, and they report more scientific publications as well as more frequent entrepreneurial results. There is neither a positive nor negative relationship between academic publishing and entrepreneurial outputs.