Stimulating Academic Entrepreneurship through Technology Business Incubation: Lessons for the Incoming Sponsoring University

Abstract

Universities facilitate academic entrepreneurship or their ‘third mission’ by making available supporting mechanisms such as science and technology parks, incubators, and entrepreneurship programs. Botswana’s STEM University seeks to develop a technology park in which it will commercialize the research and intellectual property developed by its faculty members, students, research centers and the country’s private sector through incubation and other processes. As a business support process, technology business incubation nurtures start-up companies and mitigates the risk of their early failure. In this enabling environment, start-ups can concentrate on technology transfer and later “hatch” or leave the incubator financially viable and self-sustaining. Pursuing academic entrepreneurship and the university-model of technology business incubation present benefits for the country, the local community and the university in terms of economic development, economic diversification, job creation, technology development, viable firms, successful products, and the enhancement of university income and prestige. However, university and faculty culture, and the extent of faculty members’ knowledge and skills in entrepreneurship and social capital may temper this potential. Utilizing a narrative review of the literature, this paper sought to identify critical issues a newly-participating university should be aware of as it seeks to adopt the university-model of business incubation to facilitate its transformation from a primary focus on its traditional research and teaching missions to one also based on the formal commercialization activities characterizing academic entrepreneurship. The paper informs on approaches the university may adopt to encourage academic entrepreneurship among its faculty members.

Transformation of entrepreneur education programs (EEPS) of Indonesia’s higher education

“…This program is an example of teaching techniques that require students to have "direct" experience in business and practice experience to improve student EM. (Pihie and Sani, 2009); (Lyken-Segosebe et al, 2020).…”

The Commercialisation of University Research Outputs: A Review of Literature

“…Universities are perceived as vital vehicles for innovation transfer and a channel through which knowledge exchange is made more effective [22,37,38]. The resultant entities include, in addition to IP, licensing, patenting, spin-out companies and spin-in companies into university incubators and other technology bridge foundations or intermediaries which support the codification and commercialisation of knowledge in the university context for commercialisation purposes [29,[39][40][41].…”

“…Most of these policies focus on setting up structures [22,33,67], while others are concerned with funding strategies for commercialisation [13]. However, the successful commercialisation of university research depends on adopting a synergistic policy mix and creating an environment favourable to learning and collaboration among the triple helix model actors [37,52]. Therefore, policies must be encompassing and tough all players in the commercialisation chain.…”

“…Universities may tussle to win at both academic and commercial frontiers. To avoid the struggles of interest and traditional bias, academic and commercial research activities should be strictly separated [37,79,80].…”

“…TTOs can assist in setting up such a dual structure that helps to better distinguish between both activities [37,80]. Universities need to have strong TTOs to encourage inventors to implement the commercialisation strategies and support them through the commercialisation process [20,33,79,81,82].…”