Scientist Entrepreneurship

Description

ABSTRACT: Most of the studies measuring and analyzing technology transfer and knowledge spillovers from universities turn to the databases collected by the universities which report the activities of the Offices of Technology Transfer. This paper instead examined university scientist entrepreneurship not by asking the University Technology Transfer Offices what they do in terms of entrepreneurial activities, but rather university scientists directly what they do in terms of entrepreneurial activities. The results from this study were as startling and novel as they are revealing. While the Offices of Technology Transfer databases suggest that new firm startups by university scientists are not particularly a frequent occurrence, this study instead finds exactly the opposite. Most striking is that using a large database of scientists funded by grants from the United States National Foundation, this study finds that around 13 percent of the scientists have started a new firm. These findings suggested that university scientist entrepreneurship is considerably more prevalent that would be indicated by the data collected by the Offices of Technology Transfer and compiled by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM).

In addition, the propensity for a university scientist to be engaged in entrepreneurial activity apparently varies considerably across scientific fields. In certain fields, such as computer and network systems, the prevalence of entrepreneurship is remarkably high, 23.8 percent. Similarly, in civil, mechanical, and manufacturing innovation, over one in five of the university scientists report starting a new business.

By contrast, in other scientific fields, the prevalence of entrepreneurship is considerably more subdued. For example, in environmental biology, only 4.6 percent of the university scientists report having started a new business. Similarly, in particle and nuclear astrophysics 6.2 percent of the scientists have started a new firm, and in biological infrastructure 8.2 percent of the scientists have started a new firm.

There is also considerable evidence that university scientist entrepreneurship mirrors the entrepreneurial activity for the more general population in certain important ways, while in other ways scientist entrepreneurship clearly differs from more general entrepreneurial activity. In sharp contrast to what has been found in the entrepreneurship literature for the general population, certain personal characteristics of university scientists, such as age and experience, do not seem to influence the likelihood of a scientist becoming an entrepreneur. However, gender influences the entrepreneurial decision of university scientists in much the same way it does for the general population. Males have a greater likelihood of starting a new business, both for university scientists as well as for the more general population. Similarly, access to resources and high social capital, in the form of linkages to private companies, encourages entrepreneurial activity among university scientists, just as it does for the overall population.

The empirical evidence from this study indicates that the determinants of university scientist entrepreneurship apparently are not constant across scientific fields. Rather, what is important in influencing scientific entrepreneurship in some scientific fields is less important in other scientific fields. For example, the extent of social capital has no statistically significant impact on the entrepreneurial activity of university scientists in scientific fields such as environmental biology, while it has a positive and statistically significant impact on entrepreneurial activity in civil, mechanical, and manufacturing innovation, as well as in computer and network systems.

While the age of the university scientist generally does not play an important role, the empirical evidence does point to a negative relationship between age and entrepreneurial activity that is more radical and less innovative in nature. In particular, those university scientists starting a new business for products that are highly innovative tend to be younger.

Thus, the findings of this paper based on asking university scientists about their entrepreneurial activities suggest that entrepreneurship is considerably more prevalent among a broad spectrum of university scientists than had been previously identified using databases reporting what Offices of Technology Transfer are doing in terms of entrepreneurship. The results from this study would suggest that the spillover of knowledge from universities for commercialization, innovation and ultimately economic growth, employment creation and global competitiveness is substantially more robust than had been previously thought.

BIO: David Audretsch is a Distinguished Professor and Ameritech Chair of Economic Development at Indiana University, where he is also serves as Director of the Institute for Development Strategies. He also is an Honorary Professor of Industrial Economics and Entrepreneurship at the

WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management in Germany. In addition, he serves as a Visiting Professor at the King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, Honorary Professor at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena in Germany, and is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London.

Audretsch’s research has focused on the links between entrepreneurship, government policy, innovation, economic development and global competitiveness. His research has been published in over one hundred scholarly articles in the leading academic journals.

His books include Valuing the Entrepreneurial Enterprise (with Link, Albert N.), (2013), Oxford University Press; Creating Competitiveness: Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policies for Growth (with Walshok, Mary L.), (2013), Edward Elgar Publishing; Handbook of Research on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (with Oliver Falck, Stephan Heblich and Adam Lederer), (2011), Edward Elgar Publishing

Entrepreneurship and Openness (with Robert Litan and Robert Strom), 2009, Edward Elgar Publishing; The Entrepreneurial Society. (2007). Oxford University Press, Inc.; Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth, with Oxford University Press in 2006 and The Entrepreneurial Society, also with Oxford University Press in 2007.

He is co-founder and co-editor of Small Business Economics: An Entrepreneurship Journal. He was awarded the 2001 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research by the Swedish Foundation for Small Business Research. In 2008, he received an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Augsburg, and in September, 2010 he received an honorary doctorate degree from Jonkoeping University.

He is a member of the Advisory Board to a number of international research and policy institutes, including the Deutsches Institut fuer Wirtschaftsforschung (German Institute for Economic Analysis), the Basque Institute for Competitiveness, and the Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum.