Institutional Conflict of Interest: The Role of Interlocking Directorates in the Scientific Relationships Between Universities and the Corporate Sector

We examined the potential for institutional conflict of interest between the 26 private universities belonging to the Association of American Universities and the corporations to which they are tied through their boards of trustees. We were interested in the degree to which interlocks may have tightened over three points across an 11-year period (1994–2005). Our examination relies on a set of patenting profiles estimated from the universities and corporations in our sample. These were derived through a set of organization-event networks that were compared in terms of their structural similarity. We generated these profiles at each of the three time periods. We then measured the degree to which interlocks existed within and between the profiles with the hypothesis that systematically tighter interlocks within profiles may suggest the greater potential for institutional conflict of interest.