Abstract
Even though much has been written on the role of universities and other research organizations on economic development, this edited volume by Tüzin Baycan is welcome by providing a deeper look at one aspect of this topic, the specific process of moving knowledge into public use. Each journal-quality chapter is an independent, well-referenced empirical contribution on different aspects of the knowledge valorization process, drawing on cases from Europe, the United States, and China. The chapters highlight important aspects of this process, including the historical emergence of entrepreneurial universities, approaches used at universities to promote knowledge valorization, faculty attitudes toward entrepreneurship and commercialization, university–industry linkages, cross-border knowledge transfers, incubation programs, and university infrastructure to support and promote knowledge valorization.
Baycan’s introductory chapter provides a road map to the book with a brief summary of each chapter that places the book within the larger framework of the role of universities in economic development. Baycan explains that the concept of “valorization of knowledge” is generally used in Europe to explain the transformation of knowledge into economic value, whereas in the United States, technology commercialization is the generally accepted concept describing this process. “Knowledge valorization” is presented as a preferred broader concept that describes the transformation of knowledge into something of value.
The first chapter, by Miller and Acs, is a well-written overview of the development of the engagement mission of U.S. universities and how they borrowed ideas from Europe (particularly Germany) in developing the research university. Innovations in education include provisions introduced at the University of Virginia in 1824 that freed students to pursue study in areas of the student’s choice rather than directed toward particular fields, the University of Wisconsin’s “Wisconsin Idea” that expanded the university’s mission to serve the entire state, and the University of Chicago’s goal to make the university the anchor research university for Chicago and beyond. The chapter traces the emergence of the entrepreneurial university in the United States from the early leadership of selected universities, through national initiatives such as the Vannevar Bush report, the Bayh Dole reforms, and Clark Kerr’s concept of the multiuniversity. The chapter shows how U.S. universities used successful strategies of borrowing ideas from overseas and leveraged university knowledge to address local and regional societal challenges. Despite the strength of this chapter, the authors do make some largely unsupported statements that detract from its otherwise high quality about the need to alter technology transfer functions at U.S. universities, the questionable value of large federal grants in supporting commercialization, and the fact that individually focused models, rather than institution focused approaches, provide a superior approach to spur commercialization activities.
Stough, Aberman, Baycan, and Vulto use the concept of the “innovation column” in a chapter that conceptualizes the rate of knowledge conversion and its absorption by the community, using George Mason University as a case study. The chapter focuses on the reorganization of the technology transfer and commercialization process at George Mason to show how a university moved from a “university-centric” model to a “company-centric” model. Previously the university focused on protecting intellectual property (IP), thus making it difficult for technology to move through the innovation column toward commercial development. Details were not provided on the former approach, but my reading was that the university was internally focused on patenting and protecting IP rather than determining the marketability of IP and ways to move the IP toward commercialization. The new externally focused approach has brought in support from the business and venture community to help assess the commercialization potential of university IP and provide a pathway to move promising technology forward. Although many other universities have also moved from a protection and patenting approach toward a focus on the commercial viability of university IP, the case does provide additional information and how internal university-focused approaches could be modified.
A rather understudied aspect of the entrepreneurial turn of universities is faculty attitudes to this refocusing. Goldstein and Rehbogen assess faculty member support of university-led economic engagement, technology transfer, and commercialization activities and whether they believe that such activities are in conflict with the norms of open science. Faculty members from selected disciplines from different types of universities are compared in this survey-based study. The findings show that most faculty members support community engagement activities but offer less support for aggressive technology commercialization activities such as investing university funds into new enterprises. Differences across disciplines were noted, with faculty members from biology, history, and English most concerned with conflicts with the norms of open science and faculty members from chemical engineering, economics, and computer sciences less concerned about such conflicts. Computer science faculty members are most supportive about academic entrepreneurship, with faculty members from public institutions more in favor of academic entrepreneurship than those from private institutions. Although these results are of interest, the chapter could have been stronger by examining the cultural differences across these disciplines and institution types to provide a deeper explanation into these faculty perspectives.
Ljunggren and Westlund also examine faculty attitudes using results from questionnaires and semistructured interviews at universities in Sweden (Stockholm University and the Royal Institute for Technology) with a focus on attitudes and experiences in participation in collaborative work with industry. Approaching the topic from the perspective of social capital theory, the chapter also looks at the variation of attitudes across disciplines, how internal and external networks are developed and maintained, and whether university programs and offices (central infrastructure) to increase external collaboration are considered useful by faculty. The authors provide interesting concluding observations on the importance of networks used by faculty members in humanities and scientific and technical disciplines, and the value of university infrastructure, and particularly central offices, suggesting that technical faculty members already have their own networks through their disciplinary and departmental contacts and rely less on central university support to develop external collaboration. Although the details on the differences across disciplines are welcome, it would have been helpful if the authors would have described the central infrastructure at the Royal Institute for Technology.
Feser’s chapter points out that at many universities there is disconnect between efforts to promote faculty entrepreneurship and formal entrepreneurship educational programs. He uses the University of Manchester as a case study to examine the challenges of entrepreneurship education at research universities and how this is integrated with a university’s goal to promote entrepreneurship and commercialization. This is a refreshing contribution through its honest and critical look at one university’s efforts to create a central unit to promote entrepreneurship compared to many case studies that focus only on the positive or success stories without providing lessons on what did not go as expected. The chapter places its contribution within the larger context of how aggressive universities can be in their generative roles. The chapter concludes that more work needs to be done on the interface between a university’s efforts on commercial development with its entrepreneurial education programs. Some of the problems encountered include the mismatch between the experiences and expertise of university faculty members who conduct scholarly work on entrepreneurship to practicing entrepreneurs who may lack a scholarly perspective but are brought in to teach courses.
Two chapters look at aspects of knowledge valorization performance in the Netherlands. As noted in the chapter by van Geenhuizen, the Netherlands performs high in scientific performance to European peers but is underperforming in bringing university discoveries into the marketplace. The chapter evaluates the performance of technology projects in the Netherlands to see how many led to the introduction of new products, processes, or methods into the market or society and whether the “cognitive distance” between universities and businesses is a factor in this measure of performance.
The chapter yields interesting findings, including that one must expect a long time for most projects to move into societal use. Almost one third of the projects were still engaged in research and development (R&D) after 10 years. This information may be sobering for university administrators and others who look to create immediate payoff from investments in university technology projects. Interviews with project managers suggest that cognitive distance plays an important role as a barrier to knowledge valorization, but its role as a barrier has diminished somewhat in more recent years. Van Hermert, Nijkamp, and Masurel look at cross-border knowledge interactions on regional and national systems of innovation in the Netherlands, based on the view that such systems are tied into complex webs of relations involving international organizations and networks. The chapter is based on an analysis of data collected on 416 Dutch small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that received funding from the Dutch government. The sample was thus drawn from SMEs that received funds specifically to encourage them to take advantage of knowledge from universities or other knowledge-generating entities. The authors acknowledge that the sample is not representative of all SMEs in the Netherlands. The analysis shows that regional innovation system networks are important for firm innovation performance but that firms do take advantage of international partners and associations to enhance their performance even though innovation performance is not improved only through cross-border interactions. Although the study is interesting for the case of the Netherlands, the small size of the country and its convenient location to nearby countries with substantial industry R&D capacity make the conclusions not unexpected.
Two other contributions examine university–industry linkages in Europe. Grinevich considers whether university–industry interactions in the United Kingdom lead to better firm performance, whereas Pinto and Fernández-Esquinas look at linkages in a peripheral region of Spain. Grinevich notes that although many studies look at knowledge linkages between universities and industry, few evaluate whether such linkages result in higher firm performance. Using changes in labor productivity as a measure of economic performance of an industrial sector in a given region in the United Kingdom, Grinevich uses a shift share regression model to generate measures of industry productivity that would have been predicted based on national sectoral trends and regional mix alone. This is to determine measures of changes in labor productivity resulting from region-specific effects. The measure of region-specific effects is then used as the dependent variable in an ordinary least squares model to evaluate the regional impact of university–industry links in contributing to labor productivity. Grinevich shows that industry uses university sources of knowledge to complement other sources of knowledge, such as those provided by other companies or suppliers, and that productivity gains by industry are not significantly related to their colocation with universities. Thus, universities are seen as a contributor to industry growth in combinations with other sources of knowledge, and the research size of the university also matters. Pinto and Fernández-Esquinas use results from surveys of firms and research groups to investigate research organization–industry knowledge transfer in the Spanish region of Andalusia. The authors note the importance of examining knowledge transfers in peripheral regions because the firms there are likely to be smaller and less connected to primary knowledge centers. The authors explain some of the limitations faced by companies in peripheral regions, such as having limited R&D capability and difficulties using patents or specialized knowledge. Also, the authors note that most of the scientific capabilities of such regions are concentrated within universities. It would have been helpful if the authors provided data or referenced other work summarizing these challenges. But Andalusia is not without its strengths. It has a population of 9 million and has nine public universities with 17,000 professors.
Business incubators can promote linkages between universities and small businesses as they work to nurture small businesses by providing space, business development support, and networking activities. The role of business incubators in knowledge valorization is an important topic given the expansion of incubation programs throughout the world; the fact that many, but certainly not all, are subsidized by government entities or even universities; and that many are justified on their economic development outcomes. The chapter by Noltes, Masurel, and Buddingh provides a typology of incubators then briefly describes business-incubating programs in Europe with a view toward determining if different types of incubators have different success outcomes. Outcomes can be considered “soft,” such as continued support for the incubation program, and “hard” measures such as job creation numbers or follow-on investment into incubating companies. The authors report the results of an online questionnaire distributed to incubation managers across Europe that returned a disappointing response rate of 12.8% that reported on the characteristics of incubators and measures of performance that are compared across different types of incubators. Although some of the results are of interest, notably that job creation outcomes are higher in university business incubators than in business innovation centers or independent business incubators, and that independent incubators report the best progress in growing enterprises, the chapter itself is not as well developed as most of the other contributions in the book. For instance, the chapter focuses overly on the typology of incubators but really does not do justice in providing information on their management structure, differences in their incubation policies (such as graduation criteria or progress toward graduation), role of advisory boards, relationship to funding agencies, or recruitment strategies.
The final chapter, by Rao, Piccaluga, and Meng, examines technology transfer programs in China with a focus on the staffing of university faculty, research offices, and technology transfer offices. Given the rapid growth of China’s industrial innovation and university research capacity, this topic should be of interest to many. The chapter uses regression analyses on data obtained on Chinese universities from the Ministry of Education to test hypotheses relating the relationship between measures of contract and technology transfer performance. Results indicate that an increase in the number of university faculty, R&D staff, and technology transfer staff is positively related to technology transfer performance but that technology transfer performance does not appear to be related to measures of the quality of the staffing at universities. The authors suggest that most Chinese universities are still developing their expertise in technology transfer and research administration and could benefit by increased attention toward deepening expertise at the universities and exploiting it fully. Although the chapter presents very good information, it is choppy in places with a number of grammatical and spelling errors that make it difficult to follow in places.
Despite my criticisms of certain chapters, the book is a valuable contribution to the literature on universities, technology transfer, and economic development. For instance, it could be one of assigned readings for a graduate seminar since almost all of the contributions show how they fit within the larger literature as well as making independent contributions of their own. It is obvious that the author worked with the individual contributors to relate chapters to one another and to the knowledge valorization theme so that the book is a coherent volume rather than a compendium of independent articles.