My dissertation consists of three essays on knowledge production and technology commercialization. The first essay sheds light on how industrial firms affect university knowledge production, and the second investigates gender-diverse environments and scientists’ research directions. The third essay focuses on the demand side of the market for technology. The first chapter, “How Does Industry Shape Academic Science? Evidence from ‘Million Dollar Plants’, explores whether and how firms can impact the research direction and commercial focus of academic scientists’ publications. While scientific knowledge has long been viewed as an input for firms, the innovation ecosystem can also operate in the opposite direction—firms may shift the course of academic research. I exploit the site selection of large industrial facilities (“Million Dollar Plants”) as a quasi-experiment, comparing scientists in counties that successfully attracted these facilities (“winners”) to those in counties that narrowly missed out (“runners-up”). I find that firms shift scientists’ work toward more applied topics, not only through direct funding and collaboration but also via indirect attention channels. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first paper to examine the causal impact of industry on academic scientists across different fields. The second chapter, “Peers Matter: The Heterogeneous Effects of Female Peers on Scientists’ Research Focus”, investigates whether gender-diverse academic environments influence the direction of scientific research. Scientific studies have historically underrepresented topics related to women’s welfare. Using data on the dissertations of nearly all U.S. healthcare and biology PhD recipients from 1985 to 2015, I find that an increase in female peers within a cohort encourages female PhD students to pursue more gender-related research but discourages male students from doing so. The above two chapters focus on the production of academic knowledge. I further extend my research agenda to technology commercialization in Chapter 3, coauthored with David Hsu. This chapter, “Exploring the Demand for External Technologies: The Roles of Appropriability and Absorptive Capacity”, examines firm-level predictors of licensing activity in the market for technology. We assemble a novel dataset of patent licenses disclosed by public firms and identify all firms that cited the licensed patents as potential licensees. We find that firms with both high general absorptive capacity and high technology-specific absorptive capacity are more likely to license, while firms with only high technology-specific absorptive capacity are less likely to do so.