Artistic work can offer powerful ways to enhance the societal impact and dissemination of scientific research. The practice of engaging with the Arts, however, is still far from widespread among scientists. In this study, we examine the factors that increase the likelihood that a principal investigator (PI) integrates some engagement with the Arts in the design of a research project. We draw on a database of 31,859 NSF standard grants (2003–2023) in geosciences and biology. Through a search for a set of keywords in project descriptions, we identify the rare projects that engage with the Arts. We find that projects designed by female scientists, in universities of lower research intensity, are most likely to engage with the Arts. Moreover, occurrences of this practice vary considerably across scientific subdomains. Additionally, addressing a sustainable development goal may either increase or decrease the likelihood that a project engages with the Arts, depending on the specific goal at hand.

Les collaborations entre scientifiques et artistes font régulièrement parler d’elles à travers des expositions intrigantes ou des performances artistiques au sein de laboratoires scientifiques. Mais qu’est-ce qui motive vraiment les chercheuses et les chercheurs à s’associer à des artistes ?

Advice-seeking is an essential, daily R&D task. Therefore, the configuration of advice ties around a focal R&D worker likely determines their individual performance. Among the network dimensions considered in prior research, the geographical distance between advice providers and a focal advice seeker rarely has been investigated, despite widespread recognition that geography strongly affects knowledge circulation. To capture the effects of geographical distance on advice-seeking success, the current study takes a mixed method approach and investigate R&D engineers in a French cluster related to the semi-conductor industry. By analyzing the lived experience of 17 R&D workers, as recounted in in-depth interviews, we draw a conceptual distinction between surface and deep advice-seeking (study 1). These types differ in terms of their temporality, form of reciprocity and expected contribution. Consistent with this dual conceptualization and previous literature on the geography of knowledge, we predict that distant ties in the context of deep advice-seeking are beneficial to the innovation performance of R&D workers, but detrimental in the context of surface advice-seeking. A test of these hypotheses, involving 113 R&D workers, provides support for the proposed model (study 2). All in all, the paper sheds new light on geography and location as essential factors of innovation.