[EN] The recent policy agenda to enhance translational research in biomedicine emphasizes the need to promote interactions among all the actors involved in the medical innovation process. While patients are generally acknowledged to be a critical source to facilitate medical innovation, there is little empirical evidence on the relation between direct contact with patients and medical innovation. Drawing on organizational psychology and institutional theory research, we propose that contact with beneficiaries is likely to enhance scientists' propensity to engage in innovation activities, and that the intensity of this relation is contingent on the institutional setting in which actors are embedded. Our study is based on a large-scale survey of biomedical scientists in Spain. Our findings show an inverted U-shaped relationship between contact with patients and participation in medical innovation. We also observe that the effect of contact with patients varies depending on the institutional logic in which scientists are embedded: our results show that the positive relation between contact with patients and innovation is particularly pronounced for scientists who are embedded in a science logic compared to a care logic. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This work received support from the Plan Nacional de I+D+I (projects ECO2014-59381-R and ECO2011-28749), Spain. Earlier versions of this paper where presented in two paper development workshops (Oslo, 2013 and Gothenburg, 2014). We thank all participants for their insightful comments. We also thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors for providing constructive comments and insights that helped us to improve the paper. We are also grateful to David Barbera and Francesco Rentocchini for their advice. All errors and omissions remain our own.