Managing the Process of Turning Researchers into Knowledge-Intensive Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Universities are increasingly engaged with a diverse set of activities, aimed at impacting the surrounding society, including starting firms based on research. But how do university incubators manage researchers? In this paper, the empirical setting is Sweden, where previous research suggests that the Swedish institutional context likely leads to a prioritization of commercialization by firm creation, rather than licensing or sales of IP. The reason is that the individual researcher owns all research outcomes in Sweden and not the university or state. Therefore, our paper explores how incubator and technology transfer office managers (hereafter innovation managers) reason when trying to manage researchers to reach the goal of creating knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial (KIE) firms. Two findings are of particular relevance for the literature. The first finding relates to how interviewed managers view researchers. Although expected from previous research, we provide more detailed understanding of why innovation managers perceive these researchers as being slow, less eager to start a business, and stuck on technical improvements, but also that their ideas are viewed as high-impact ones. Our second finding provides more detailed insights into how these managers developed a number of alternative paths to deal with researchers as potential entrepreneurs and still achieve commercialization. With or without the active participation of the researcher owning the ideas, we detail how these managers pursue two paths towards utilizing researchers’ ideas in order to impact society – namely actively seeking ways to start a KIE firm or actively seeking ways to transfer and distribute the ideas more widely.