Public or private entrepreneurship? Revisiting motivations and definitions of success among academic entrepreneurs

Christopher Hayter ()

The Journal of Technology Transfer, 2015, vol. 40, issue 6, 1003-1015

Abstract: The choice of university faculty to engage in academic entrepreneurship—the establishment and management of a university spinoff company—is a critical component of university economic development efforts. Replicating Hayter (J Technol Transf 36:340–352, 2011 ), this study investigates motivations and definitions of success among academic entrepreneurs, how they evolve, and why. The results show that academic entrepreneurs are motivated by a number of distinct, yet interrelated reasons and that spinoffs are viewed as a vehicle to pursue SBIR awards and consulting opportunities that can, in turn, enhance their traditional academic teaching and research responsibilities. Several academic entrepreneurs have enjoyed commercialization success yet, as a group, near-term commercialization goals and financial motivations have become relatively less important. While these findings have important implications for policy, they also signal a new conceptualization of university spinoffs as a low-growth contract research firm and provide empirical support for the emerging theory of public entrepreneurship. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Technology transfer; Economic development; Entrepreneurial motivations; 033; Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10961-015-9426-7 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jtecht:v:40:y:2015:i:6:p:1003-1015

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... nt/journal/10961/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10961-015-9426-7

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Technology Transfer is currently edited by Albert N. Link, Donald S. Siegel, Barry Bozeman and Simon Mosey

More articles in The Journal of Technology Transfer from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().