Crossing boundaries between science and innovation: Career mobility and impacts of graduates of the UK Industrial Doctoral Centers (IDCs)

The mobility of individuals represents a crucial mechanism through which knowledge flows across organisations, in the labour market and between places. There has been an increasing policy attention to the mobility of scientific researchers at various stages of their careers, especially for doctoral students and doctoral graduates in bridging the gaps between science and innovation closer. This paper focuses on one of the collaborative doctoral training schemes between academia and industry –a case of the Engineering Doctorate (EngD) scheme in the UK as a distinct model from the traditional PhD. The paper presents the mobility of EngD graduates based on the illustrative case studies of three Industry Doctorate Centres (IDCs) for the period between 2001 and 2014. The EngD graduates’ career paths and mobility suggests knowledge dissemination and exploitation with diverse spatial implication – the talents are collocated in specific industry locations with local, national and international knowledge flows, skills, R&D and innovation activities.