Gender diversity in academic entrepreneurship: Social impact motives and the NSF I-corps program

April Burrage, Nilanjana Dasgupta and Ina Ganguli

Research Policy, 2025, vol. 54, issue 3

Abstract: This study examines gender differences in the social impact and commercial motives for academic entrepreneurship using the National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps (NSF I-Corps) program. I-Corps provides experiential entrepreneurship training to faculty and graduate student researchers at local I-Corps university sites and through a nationwide program. Since the inception of I-Corps, only 20 % of participants have been women. We first use survey data from one I-Corps university site to show that women had higher social entrepreneurial intentions compared to commercial entrepreneurial intentions, and their social entrepreneurial intentions were higher than men's. We then extend and generalize this finding by analyzing 1267 publicly available project summaries from the National I-Corps Program from 2011 to 2019. We find that women PIs' project proposals emphasized social impact significantly more than men, while projects for all PIs emphasized commercial impact to a similar degree. We next ran a field experiment to estimate the causal impact of social impact vs. commercial motives by experimentally manipulating the recruitment email messages inviting researchers to participate in the I-Corps training program. We find that women were more likely to show interest in a social impact version of a message compared to a commercial version, while men showed equal interest in both types of messages. Taken together, our results indicate that women are more interested in pursuing commercialization and entrepreneurship activities when they are tackling societal problems. They suggest that low-cost interventions that emphasize the social impact value of entrepreneurial opportunities may increase gender diversity in entrepreneurship activities.

Keywords: Academic entrepreneurship; Commercialization; Gender; Innovation; Social impact; Motivation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004873332400218X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:respol:v:54:y:2025:i:3:s004873332400218x

DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2024.105169

Access Statistics for this article

Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray

More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().