Title: Scientists are Entrepreneurs so Why Universities are Not Entrepreneurial
Abstract: Universities need to be innovative and entrepreneurial as much as any business does. In fact, universities should be at the very heart of innovation and entrepreneurship contributing to the changing economic landscape. But they are not. Current day universities are too bureaucratic resembling corporate organizations, they educate mainly 'job seekers' who are not as prepared as they need to be to contribute, they suffer from decreasing number of science and technology students and are weak at technology transfer. Yet, according to Drucker (1985) no better text for a history of entrepreneurship could be found than the creation and development of the modern university, and especially the modern American university. Schramm (2006) argues that universities were very entrepreneurial. Indeed it were entrepreneurs outside of the academic world who started some of the most successful American universities - John Rockefeller (University of Chicago, 1890), Leland Stanford, University of Stanford, 1891), Ezra Cornell (University of Cornell, 1865), John Eastman (University of Rochester). In this article we suggest a framework for transferring universities to regain their central role as change agents based on innovation and entrepreneurship. We do so based on a comparative analysis of scientific research and the Schumpeterian entrepreneurial processes. The proposition we put forward is that university's research driven knowledge creation process and the scientists who are at the center of this process is in essence an entrepreneurial process driven by entrepreneurs. By making this process visible and acceptable we can transform university to again become entrepreneurial as universities were in their early days. A study on entrepreneurs in research universities by Blumenthal et al (1989) has indeed identified five types of entrepreneurs among faculty members in the life sciences. The study has also identified that university policies and structures (bureaucracy) have little effect on holding back entrepreneurship among university staff once they decide to go on an entrepreneurial journey. Our study i a comparative analysis of key characteristics of the entrepreneurial process (Scumpeter, Knight, Kirzner, Casson, Shane), with university research projects from the idea phase, through proposal development, fund raising, managing and up to the completion of the research. Our data is based on study of research projects that were funded by the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO), and structured interviews with scientist entrepreneurs who are involved in university spin-offs. Our study suggests that university research projects and entrepreneurial venture have much in common. In fact, there are surprising resemblances between the business entrepreneur and the scientist, and between the entrepreneurial process and academic research projects. Scientist who are successful in competing on, and raising research funding, in attracting the best PhD and researchers are in fact thinking and acting like business entrepreneurs. We believe that the analysis and the suggested framework in this paper contribute to the discussion on a model of entrepreneurial university.
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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