University-based discoveries that drive economic growth are a natural byproduct of scientific research. However, many of these inventions never realize their full potential value because they “languish” in universities and never diffuse to the broader economy. University technology license agreements are critical tools for idea diffusion. However, some fear that giving scientists more commercial responsibilities will crowd out core scientific tasks like basic research. To assess these competing viewpoints, this Note investigates the impact of university technology licensing on scientists’ academic research performance at Stanford University, finding that licensing significantly increases the number of papers that a scientist publishes and providing a promising indication of the complementarity of academic research and technology transfer.