To What Extent is Academic Entrepreneurship Taken for Granted Within Research Universities?

Abstract

We test the hypothesis that academic entrepreneurship, resisted in the past by some as being in conflict with the long-standing Mertonian norms of open science and free enquiry, has now become widely accepted within the academy, or ‘taken for granted’, as an institutional shift. Using responses to a series of attitudinal questions about academic entrepreneurship and commercialization of the university from a National Survey of Technology Transfer Office directors and faculty in the United States, we explain the variation in attitudes among faculty by academic discipline, by type of university and by previous experience as an entrepreneur. We compare the attitudes of faculty to the attitudes of technology transfer office directors to gauge the width of the gap between these two groups of stakeholders. The empirical results provide strong evidence that the commercialization of the university is by no means yet ‘taken for granted’.