How did that affect getting tenure? My experience watching my advisor go through that process is that an industry stint would negatively impact the process.
There are a lot of variables, but from personal experience it also depends on how you talk about that experience in your tenure dossier. I was able to spin a research finding into a commercial product. Due to intracompany politics, that product never shipped. But my tenure committee talked glowingly about my ability to take a research idea and polish it into something that a major software company would pay me to commercialize.
