Abstract
University business incubators (UBIs) are uniquely positioned to foster transnational entrepreneurship and the evolution of business and technical communication practices on a worldwide basis. UBIs facilitate the launch of start-ups by professors, students, researchers, and local entrepreneurs. This study uses assemblage theory to profile four UBIs. Its findings concern their process of exporting incubation models and training transnational entrepreneurs, the roles of alumni and students, and the genres and conventions of entrepreneurship.
Keywords
It is no secret that universities have been recasting themselves as centers for economic growth and entrepreneurship (Etzkowitz et al., 2000; Thorp & Goldstein, 2010; Veugelers, 2016). Most, if not all, states are now looking to their public universities to spur the development of new products and services, launch and accelerate start-up companies, and create entrepreneurial ecosystems. At the heart of these ecosystems is an increasing number of university business incubators (UBIs) that launch start-ups by professors, students, researchers, and local entrepreneurs. Some of the more prominent UBIs in the United States include Georgia Tech’s VentureLab, University of California–Berkeley’s SkyDeck, University of Texas’s Austin Technology Incubator, Stanford’s StartX, the University of Washington’s CoMotion, and Purdue University’s Foundry. Prominent UBIs outside of North America include NovaUCD at the University College Dublin in Ireland, Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey’s (ITESM) Business Incubator Network (BIN) in Mexico, the C4DLab at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, CURAD (Consortium for Enhancing University Responsiveness to Agribusiness Development) Agribusiness Incubator at Makerere University in Uganda, and Chrysalis Incubadora PUCV at Chile’s Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso.
In this article, we argue that UBIs have become transnational hubs that are part of an ongoing shift toward entrepreneurship in business and technical communication (Drori et al., 2009). At UBIs, faculty members, researchers, and students from around the globe learn the genres, conventions, and terminology of entrepreneurship, including business models, proposals, pitches, canvases, case studies, blogs, protocols, specifications, patent applications, and so on. They then proliferate this entrepreneurial form of business and technical communication transnationally by sharing their ideas and expertise with other UBIs around the globe. We draw on assemblage theory (DeLanda, 2016; Deleuze & Guattari, 1989) to profile four leading UBIs: ITESM’s BIN, University of Washington’s CoMotion, University College Dublin’s NovaUCD, and Purdue University’s Foundry. Specifically, we explore how these UBIs use entrepreneurial genres, conventions, and terminology to launch and accelerate start-up companies in transnational contexts. For this study, we used a mixed-methods case study methodology to compare and contrast these UBIs’ entrepreneurial methods and communications. By interviewing key actors, performing on-site visits, and analyzing their communication practices, we pursued the following objectives: identify transnational interconnections between UBIs and entrepreneurs created through business and technical communication practices explore how UBIs transform university-based innovation into global economic development analyze how business and technical communication practices foster interactions within and between incubators as this transnational exchange occurs investigate how genres and conventions of business and technical communication are modified and utilized within UBIs to help entrepreneurs work within overlapping innovation-based ecosystems
Our study answers recent calls for theories and methodologies that are more rhizomatic and network-focused when studying transnational business and technical communication practices (Fraiberg, 2017; Sun, 2020). We illustrate how business and technical communication practices are being modified to fit entrepreneurial needs in these transnational networks. Our premise is that UBIs are uniquely positioned to foster transnational entrepreneurship and the evolution of business and technical communication practices on a worldwide basis. Assemblage theory, we will demonstrate, offers a useful epistemology for explaining how entrepreneurial ecosystems operate locally and transnationally. This theory is especially adept at explaining how communication ecosystems evolve because it emphasizes change and lines of communication. We conclude this article by speculating about how business and technical communication practices can evolve to meet the new challenges of transnational entrepreneurial development and growth.
Background: What Is a University Business Incubator?
As Houser (2014) argued, universities offer ideal start-up platforms for grassroots entrepreneurship because they bring together existing networks of ambitious people while providing a stable foundation for collaborating on research, developing intellectual property, and supporting the invention of new products and services that can be commercialized. American universities, such as Georgia Tech, Purdue, Stanford, and the University of Washington, have sizable international faculty, staff, and student populations, and they support entrepreneurs who are operating in multiple and overlapping entrepreneurial ecosystems.
For this study, we were especially interested in exploring the similarities and differences among UBIs at American universities and UBIs in other countries. According to
Entrepreneur Magazine’s (n.d.) Small Business Encyclopedia, a business incubator is an organization designed to accelerate the growth and success of entrepreneurial companies through an array of business support resources and services that could include physical space, capital, coaching, common services, and networking connections.
In most ways, UBIs are similar to traditional corporate business incubators (CBIs), but there are some important differences due to how UBIs were formed and how they operate. In the 1970s, universities began establishing technology licensing offices that were designed to facilitate the transfer of university research and intellectual property (IP) to the private sector for commercialization (Sampat, 2006). Besides encouraging “tech transfer,” these offices helped university faculty and staff apply for patents, establish licensing agreements, and control trademarks. In 1980, the Bayh-Dole Act allowed universities to own the intellectual property and technologies developed by researchers who were doing federally funded research. The Bayh-Dole Act incentivized researchers and universities to commercialize their research and patents.
Further extensions of the Bayh-Dole Act sparked the formation of UBIs in the early 1980s (Mian, 1996). Identifying the original UBI would be controversial, but one of the earliest was the Edison Technology Incubator at Case Western Reserve University, founded in 1984. The number of UBIs grew quickly in the 1990s (Stal et al., 2016). Today, almost one-third of all business incubators in the United States are housed on university campuses, and almost all major research universities have developed some form of UBI to assist faculty, researchers, and students who want to launch start-ups. These UBIs capitalize on the economic value of their home institutions’ intellectual property and inventions. Today, UBIs help faculty, staff, and students go through the process of launching their own start-ups and managing their intellectual property. UBIs work closely with university foundations, which are responsible for collecting and disbursing the funds generated from licensing patents, royalties, and other intellectual property.
UBIs tend to operate differently from traditional CBIs in a few important ways. First, CBIs tend to focus their energies on early-stage companies that are in the launch and start-up phases. A start-up that becomes financially self-supporting will usually graduate out of the CBI, transitioning to other small business operations, such as accelerators, research parks, technology parks, makerspaces, and small business development centers (SBDC). In contrast, UBIs tend to provide continuing support to the businesses they help launch. Start-ups that achieve self-sufficiency are usually allowed to stay in the UBI if they want, becoming part of the university’s expanding entrepreneurial ecosystem and a growing network of businesses in and around the university campus. Second, CBIs typically provide in-house amenities, such as office space, clerical support, legal counsel, and communications whereas most UBIs rely on the university’s infrastructure for facilities, support staff, equipment, and services. The UBI itself may have an administrative office, sometimes in a “center for entrepreneurship,” but the start-up companies are often housed in the offices, laboratories, or facilities of the faculty or staff members who launched them. (As we will show, however, some UBIs are beginning to provide all the amenities of traditional CBIs, such as office space, hot desks, laboratories, and clerical support.)
And third, CBIs tend to pay their own bills by charging their tenants rent for office space and sometimes taking an equity stake in the start-ups. In contrast, UBIs are typically financed within the budget of the university. UBIs and their start-ups often apply for external grants and draw internal funds from a university-based research foundation. As a result, UBI activities tend to be financially supported within the larger university mission to manage intellectual property, grants, gifts, endowments, and other university property. This allows UBIs to take the long view because they are not dependent on whether their start-up companies are successful or make a profit. That said, the purpose of both UBIs and CBIs is to launch companies and help them become financially viable (Al-Mubaraki & Busler, 2011).
Perhaps the major difference between UBIs and CBIs is in the type of training and mentorship they provide. Entrepreneurs will usually enter a traditional CBI with an existing business model, an elevator pitch, and at least a prototype of a product or service. Quite differently, in a UBI, entrepreneurs are often still at the conceptual stage. The UBI provides training on how to launch a company, write a business model, develop pitch decks, make networking connections, and market a product or service. A UBI’s staff will often include entrepreneurs in residence (EIRs) who are assigned to individual start-ups and mentor these start-ups through the launch process. In other words, a UBI usually begins working with a potential entrepreneur much earlier than a traditional CBI would. If a potential entrepreneur’s ideas seem to have promise as a business, the UBI will use its training workshops and mentoring to help that entrepreneur launch a start-up. In contrast, a CBI might offer workshops that help a company launch, but typically the CBI’s focus is on helping existing start-ups (i.e., ones with existing business models, pitches, and products or services to be sold) become financially viable.
Due to these differences, UBIs have several advantages over traditional CBIs. First, UBIs can use their existing campus infrastructure. Professors and staff usually have their own offices, laboratories, equipment, and access to high-speed internet, so UBIs can keep overhead costs to a minimum. Second, UBIs can tap into the campus’s accounting services, legal experts, subject-matter experts, and advisors. These services are already paid for within the university’s overhead, so a start-up does not need to immediately secure investments or generate cash flow as they would in a CBI. Third, prospective entrepreneurs in UBIs are usually not gambling with their careers or life savings when launching a business. Professors have much more security, flexibility, and time than a typical entrepreneur. If a professor’s start-up takes off, the company might become a second stream of income or the beginning of a postacademic career. If the start-up fails, the lack of success probably would not damage the professor’s career or life savings. Similarly, student entrepreneurs, unlike typical entrepreneurs, can more easily enter or return to the regular workforce if their start-ups fail. In other words, entrepreneurs working with UBIs are more likely to have options to fall back on if the company does not launch successfully. Meanwhile, at traditional CBIs, entrepreneurs are often taking on much more personal risk.
The main disadvantage of UBIs, however, is that professors and students do not behave like typical entrepreneurs. They do not feel the same urgency to launch their businesses and get it generating cash flow. Deep down, even the most entrepreneurial professors are usually hoping their companies will be bought out or their intellectual property will be licensed out for someone else to commercialize. Professors are not typically interested in doing the hiring, training, managing, and firing of employees. Instead, most professors hope to hire a CEO who will manage the company’s day-to-day operations. Another disadvantage is that UBIs usually do not house their companies in one space where they can collaborate. A traditional CBI will typically bring many entrepreneurs into the same workspace, creating an atmosphere in which collaboration, creativity, and innovation naturally occur. Such collaboration tends to be more immediate because marketing specialists, computer programmers, 3-D printing specialists, and video production teams are working in nearby cubicles or on another floor. On a college campus, these kinds of experts are available but are not physically located at the UBI in a way that fosters innovation.
A difference between UBIs and CBIs that most interested us was the transnational “affect” of UBIs on entrepreneurs, start-ups, start-up communities, and the entrepreneurial ecosystems in which they reside. In assemblage theory, as in many theories, affect is an ability to affect others and be affected, usually through psychological mood, emotions, or arousal brought on by social interaction (Delanda, 2016; Deleuze & Guattari, 1989). Because universities are themselves transnational, we assumed that UBIs would have local, national, and global impacts that would allow them to affect entrepreneurial activities on a global scale. Moreover, universities play various roles in other countries, which are often different than their roles in the United States, so we wondered whether their UBIs would also operate differently. Our research confirmed some of what we assumed, but we also discovered some fascinating similarities and differences between transnational UBIs that merit further exploration.
Theory: What Is Assemblage Theory?
For this study, we developed a research methodology based on assemblage theory, which was articulated by Deleuze and Guattari (1989) and later clarified and extended by DeLanda (2016), among others. Actor network theory (ANT), which offers similar concepts as assemblage theory, has also been used to study networks in business and technical communication (Potts, 2009; Read & Swarts, 2015), but assemblage theory was more fitting for our study because of its attention to evolution and fluidity. Assemblage theory emphasizes the evolving communication lines between humans, machines, objects, and ideas that are in states of continual and sometimes rapid growth or decline. Although ANT is more flexible than a pre-1999 and strictly Latourian interpretation might suggest (Müller & Schurr, 2016), it still privileges the stable and actual over the changing and ephemeral. Therefore, we chose to base our methodology on assemblage theory. Since assemblage theory is relatively new to the field of business and technical communication (Angeli, 2018; Canniford & Bajde, 2016; Hoffman et al., 2018; Hondros, 2016; McCabe, 2018), we will now explain it in some detail.
An assemblage is a multiplicity or unity that is self-organizing and continuously in a process of becoming. As an entity in flux, an assemblage is made up of a heterogeneous whole of humans, machines, objects, and ideas that are themselves emerging, evolving, and growing. DeLanda (2016) suggested that an assemblage has two minimal requirements: emergence and exteriority (p. 88). Emergence means each assemblage is in a state of evolution—growing, changing, or devolving. Exteriority means that the assemblage itself is autonomous and defined by other assemblages that are exterior to it. Meanwhile, the elements of an assemblage have their own autonomy and agency within the whole. The elements within an assemblage, by their exteriority to each other, give each other identity and definition. Assemblage theory stresses that the assemblage itself is a living whole that is evolving and has agency because of the emergent and exterior pressures put on it.
As Deleuze and Guattari (1989) stressed, assemblage theory emphasizes the interactions between the elements of the assemblage, not the individual elements themselves. Because of rhetoric scholars’ interest in relational interplay, this emphasis makes this theory useful to researchers in business and technical communication. The theory itself studies the lines of communication by which an assemblage collectively self-organizes its elements and holds them together, a process called territorializing. An assemblage subsists by growing and territorializing new spaces, which means the multiplicity is constantly seeking to occupy new spaces and organize its gains. It territorializes these spaces by building internal structures, inventing rules and conventions, establishing habits and traditions, and developing procedures and processes. Deleuze and Guatarri called this process coding because the assemblage structures and organizes a territory (see Wise & Slack, 2005). In the process of territorializing these new spaces, however, the elements of an assemblage also pull apart, stretch, expand, and even regress. These expansions and regressions create lines of flight, or flows, in which the elements are continuously reinventing their relationships to other elements in the assemblage. As the assemblage grows and evolves, some elements of the assemblage lose their relevance, becoming less influential, a process called deterritorializing. These deterritorialized elements become either less structured or less relevant, and they are ultimately recoded within the assemblage—or left behind. In some situations, obsolete elements simply fall out of the assemblage, fading away into desuetude, or they are absorbed by another assemblage that repurposes them for its own needs.
The evolving, expanding, and devolving nature of assemblages is what makes assemblage theory useful for studying communities like start-ups and entrepreneurial ecosystems because they too are in continual flux. The basic currency within an assemblage is affect within an economy of affect (DeLanda, 2016). Each element within the assemblage affects the other elements, causing them to shift and change. An economy of affect is created as elements within an assemblage emerge and put external pressure on other elements. Some of these affects create constructive flows that territorialize and stabilize the assemblage. Other affects disrupt or deterritorialize elements of the assemblage, which creates lines of flight that can open new opportunities or spin off new assemblages.
Admittedly, we have struggled with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1989) use of mixed metaphors to explain their understanding of an assemblage. Part of the problem is due to the translation of the word “assemblage” from French into English, which we will explain in a moment. Deleuze and Guattari use the organic metaphor of a rhizome to explain what they mean by an assemblage. In nature, a rhizome is an organism with a distributed mass of roots and nodes that spreads laterally, typically underground. Examples of common rhizomes include stands of aspen trees, patches of mint, or ferns. These organisms primarily spread through a network of roots below the ground. While they spread, they send up stalks or even trunks above ground from the rhizome’s nodes. The problem with this metaphor is that a natural rhizome is homogenous (not heterogeneous), even to the point of crowding out competing plants with its dense mass of roots. Nevertheless, this rhizome metaphor is useful for viewing assemblages as always emerging, self-organizing, growing, and dying. But the concept of rhizomes, as an organic metaphor, seems to conflict with Deleuze and Guattari’s use of mechanistic metaphors to explain how assemblages work. Nail (2017) attempted to explain this conflict in metaphors: In contrast to organic unities, for Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages are more like machines, defined solely by their external relations of composition, mixture, and aggregation. In other words, an assemblage is a multiplicity, neither a part nor a whole. If the elements of an assemblage are defined only by their external relations, then it is possible that they can be added, subtracted, and recombined with one another ad infinitum without ever creating or destroying an organic unity. (p. 23)
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1989) mixed metaphor is partly caused by the translation of the word “assemblage” from French to English. In English, an assemblage is something that is assembled, or put together, like a machine. The parts of a machine do not self-organize or evolve on their own. In a machine, a part can be removed and replaced with an identical or improved part, but the basic function and operation of the machine is essentially the same. In French, the meaning of assemblage is closer to the English words “ensemble,” “association,” or “gathering.” In French, an assemblage is self-organizing and evolving, a heterogeneous ensemble of evolving elements that work together for common ends.
The best analogy we can think of that illustrates this mixed metaphor of assemblage is the internet. The internet has both organic and mechanistic features that can be viewed as heterogeneous multiplicities of humans, machines, objects, and ideas. These elements, as Nail (2017) described, “can be added, subtracted, and recombined with one another ad infinitum without ever creating or destroying an organic unity” (p. 23). Entities within the internet are constantly growing, evolving, and devolving, seeking to territorialize new and existing spaces by structuring and coding them. Meanwhile, these entities will deterritorialize spaces and elements that are no longer relevant to their existence. The internet is an assemblage of assemblages that has both organic elements (humans, animals, plants, and perhaps artificial intelligence) and mechanistic elements (computers, machines, algorithms).
A central feature of assemblage theory, as DeLanda (2016) argued, is that an assemblage has agency, allowing it to act somewhat independently and with originality. This agency is what distinguishes an assemblage from typical machines or automatons, which do not have agency. A machine, similar to an assemblage, may be a collection of heterogeneous and interchangeable parts, but the machine itself is not making independent or original choices. Instead, machines or automatons follow a routine or algorithm. An automaton can operate in ways that might seem lifelike and can even mimic agent-like or creative behavior (e.g., a chatbot or robot), but it is ultimately still following a routine or algorithm. It can mimic creativity with a randomizing function built into its algorithm, but its ability to mimic does not give it agency.
Another difference between machines and assemblages is that machines are not emergent, self-organizing, or in a process of becoming. An assemblage is made up of evolving elements that are themselves making their own decisions. The whole assemblage stays connected because its elements communicate with and affect each other, and those affiliations make these elements interdependent (Deleuze & Partner, 1987, p. viii). Because these individual elements are always evolving, the relationships and interactions between them are also evolving. Therefore, an assemblage, as a whole, is making communal decisions based on its own collective needs and motives—even decisions that individual elements might not fully comprehend or agree with.
For these reasons, assemblage theory can be useful for explaining the behavior of entrepreneurs, start-ups, start-up communities, and entrepreneurial ecosystems. Entrepreneurs and the start-ups they launch are themselves assemblages. As an assemblage, a start-up is a multiplicity of humans, machines, objects, and ideas that is attempting to territorialize an existing or new space. This territorializing nature is embedded in the standard definition of an entrepreneur as “one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). The Harvard Business School, as articulated by Howard Stevenson, defines entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources controlled” (quoted in Cohan, n.d.). Meanwhile, a start-up company is an assemblage that is situated within a start-up community, which is also an assemblage within an even larger ecosystem of assemblages that include other companies, communities, governments, networks, universities, and so on.
Assemblage theory is helpful because it offers a vocabulary that fits the entrepreneurial experience. This theory emphasizes the interplay between emergence and exteriority (manifested by communication acts) that hold an assemblage together and give it agency, identity, and capabilities. Creating and nurturing such relationships in the world of entrepreneurship and business is referred to as networking, which is, in essence, the economy of affect. People and groups in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, who are all are pursuing their own ambitions, interact and form relationships, working within a larger assemblage to accomplish tasks that they could not achieve without these relationships. Some of these affective relationships are more central to or necessary for providing the assemblage its capabilities as a whole. These core relationships are maintained by complex sets of rules, conventions, traditions, procedures, laws, and rituals. And among these networks of relationships is the ever-present give-and-take of important resources, such as investments, information, ideas, mentorship, and access.
The concept of emergence, or becoming, at the core of assemblage theory is also useful for studying the evolving assemblages that constitute entrepreneurial ecosystems, from the individual start-up, to start-up communities, to the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem. In each start-up and start-up community, the roles of humans, machines, objects, and ideas are fluid. Employees typically have various and changing roles as a start-up grows and evolves, and they can enter and exit the assemblage at various points. Employees, machines, objects, and ideas are taken in, coded, utilized, repurposed, and sometimes discarded. Meanwhile, start-up communities are growing, evolving, and contracting, with employees moving among companies and sometimes striking off to start their own companies. There are even so-called serial entrepreneurs, who launch companies, bring them to life, and then move on to start other companies in the community. In other words, start-ups and start-up communities are always becoming, evolving, and diminishing, and then growing and rebranding themselves, bringing in new members, industry connections, and business models while watching some businesses fail or be absorbed by others.
This rapid coding and decoding of business models (and the resulting changes to a company’s patterns of behavior) has a name in the entrepreneurial world: a pivot. An entrepreneurial pivot occurs when the start-up experiences a significant shift to a new strategy, turns a feature of a product into the product itself, moves into a new market, targets a new kind of customer, or adopts a new technology to cut costs or improve the product. A pivot in strategy, marketing, or manufacturing will reallocate people, machines, objects, and ideas around within the assemblage. Meanwhile, a pivot can send ripples (or shockwaves) into the larger assemblage as the changes within one company put external pressures on other companies and the entire entrepreneurial ecosystem.
In their attempts to territorialize new spaces, start-ups inevitably create an affect on other elements within the existing ecosystem. If a start-up is successful, the ecosystem needs to adapt to it. Some elements of the ecosystem will be deterritorialized, including any competitors that the new start-up challenges or makes obsolete. These competitors are forced to adapt and make space for the successful newcomer, and if competitors do not adapt, they risk being absorbed or left behind. Meanwhile, established elements of the ecosystem may gradually or suddenly become less relevant or even obsolete. When affected elements are deterritorialized, they are forced into lines of flight that cause them to rethink their own practices and business strategies. And if a start-up or enterprise company offers something truly revolutionary (i.e., a new category of product or company like the iPhone, Amazon, Netflix, or Google), then the core of an assemblage can be disrupted, causing significant deterritorializing events. In these situations, the entire ecosystem might need to restructure existing relationships and perhaps abandon now irrelevant or obsolete elements of the assemblage.
Why is assemblage theory especially useful for studying business incubators, especially ones located in universities? UBIs are a key element in many start-up communities and entrepreneurial ecosystems, providing important scaffolding that enables the coding of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. They are also responsible for helping start-up communities and ecosystems territorialize new spaces by providing internal structure, establishing rules and conventions, offering procedures and processes, and even passing along traditions. UBIs help entrepreneurial ecosystems (i.e., assemblages of assemblages) select, structure, and organize these territories at various levels. No start-up can exist on its own. Rather, a start-up will be reliant on existing assemblages, such as universities, law firms, accountants, patent offices, and other services. A start-up also needs to work in parallel with other established companies and start-ups that provide services to each other. UBIs are assemblages that facilitate these entrepreneurial activities, thereby building start-up communities. Meanwhile, as we will show, transnational UBIs, such as the ones we studied, export their practices and traditions, effectively territorializing new spaces around the globe.
Methodology: How Can Assemblage Theory Help Us Understand Transnational UBIs?
While using assemblage theory to analyze these entrepreneurial ecosystems, we focus primarily on highlighting the affective relationships between their elements. A primary strategy for approaching this goal is through mapping each entrepreneurial ecosystem as assemblages, thus illustrating how molar and molecular assemblages are nested within one another (DeLanda, 2016, p. 88; see also Angeli, 2018). These maps help us illustrate where these assemblages cross international lines, what relationships between its elements are strongest, and how these relationships structure the assemblage. Throughout this process, we also study what DeLanda referred to as the parameters of each assemblage (p. 19), that is, the degree of coding and territorialization in each assemblage.
We chose four UBIs mostly as a convenience sample. Several organizations offer rankings of UBIs, including UBI Global, a data and advisory firm based in Stockholm that publishes its annual World Rankings Report (Meyer & Sowah, 2019). After consulting these rankings, we began contacting ones we could visit and ones that offered successful models in terms of launching start-ups, generating jobs, raising capital investment, and developing intellectual property. The four UBIs we chose allowed us to analyze what Fox and Alldred (2015) called the “human and non-human, animate and inanimate, material and abstract,” cutting across micro and macro levels (p. 406). In other words, our primary focus of analysis was each assemblage and the processes and ideas that hold it together. Our methodology included four phases:
Create an archive of artifacts written or produced about each incubator we profiled. Most of these artifacts were constructed by the UBI itself, such as websites, social media posts, news releases, brochures, manuals, and so on. We also archived artifacts written or produced about each incubator and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in which it exists. These artifacts included printed and web-based magazine articles, news articles, rankings, profiles, and journal articles. Depending on the UBI, we had more or less success in gathering these written artifacts—some incubators produced a lot of material, and others did not. We used the archive to highlight any lines of communication and territorialization between the elements within the assemblage in which each incubator is situated.
Interview key agents within each incubator and its start-up ecosystem to gather facts about their role within the assemblage and the way information flows through the assemblage. We interviewed the director and coordinator of each incubator and then sought out CEOs of companies in that incubator, directors of related companies or organizations, entrepreneurial professors, and EIRs.
Conduct site visits to the incubators we profiled. We traveled to León and Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico; Dublin, Ireland; Seattle, Washington; and our own local UBI at Purdue University. At these site visits, we toured the facilities, making observations about the physical space of the ecosystem, and met with administrators, entrepreneurs, EIRs, staff, and other participants.
Map the lines of communication that hold each assemblage together. We paid special attention to the ways humans and objects communicate within the assemblage. We were especially interested in identifying and analyzing the communication activities in which the incubator, its start-ups, and the start-up ecosystem were territorializing existing or new spaces or deterritorializing spaces that were losing relevance. Specifically, we paid attention to the transnational relationships between the nodes within the assemblage. We were especially interested in how these affective connections within the assemblage worked across international boundaries.
The results of our research are qualitative, which might be viewed as a limitation. Nevertheless, our archive, interviews, site visits, and assemblage maps allowed us to draw comparisons between these incubators and the entrepreneurial ecosystems in which they exist. At a future time, generating data might be a good way to focus on specific aspects of these entrepreneurial activities, but a qualitative approach gave us a better overview of what is actually happening in these assemblages. Our field research was exempted by the Institutional Research Board at Purdue University.
Results and Discussion: What Does It Mean to Be a “Transnational” UBI?
In this section, we offer separate profiles of the four incubators we studied. First, our profiles provide an overview of each UBI, describing it as an assemblage. Then, we describe how that assemblage functions within a larger entrepreneurial ecosystem. And finally, we identify what elements are common and unique about each entrepreneurial ecosystem. After these profiles, we discuss the similarities and differences we noticed, paying attention to two major issues: (a) transnational interactions within and between these assemblages and (b) the way that genres and conventions are used to code interactions and generate affect within the assemblages in a way that shapes how each is evolving and growing.
Profile of the Business Incubator Network at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey
The ITESM is a prestigious private university system in Mexico that is well-known for entrepreneurship. At the ITESM, we interviewed incubator administrators at two of their UBIs. Moisés Carbajal, a regional director of entrepreneurship at the ITESM, asked us to profile its Business Incubator Network (BIN) as one entity rather than study a UBI on a single campus because the incubation system functions as one entity. The ITESM’s BIN was founded in October 2001 with the creation of the university’s first incubator at the Monterrey campus. Since then, the BIN has grown into an extensive network of incubators spanning Mexico. The number of incubators in the BIN has fluctuated over the last 19 years, reaching as many as 101 incubators, but a recent and extensive consolidation reduced the number to 18 incubators.
Estimating the number of start-ups launched and intellectual property created within the BIN would be difficult because of its large network, but administrators in Querétaro reported that, from its launch in 2004 to the time of our interview, their Querétaro campus alone had launched over 800 businesses. Networkwide, the BIN launched a total of 818 new companies in just 2019 alone. Querétaro administrators explained that the businesses incubated at various campuses focus on the needs specific to that region of Mexico. At Querétaro, they said about 60% of their start-ups were founded by entrepreneurs directly affiliated with the ITESM (i.e., current students, graduated students, and employees), and the remaining 40% were entrepreneurs from the community. Entrepreneurship is one of the main competencies that the ITESM strives to inculcate in its students, so all the university’s campuses require undergraduates to take one class in entrepreneurship. These courses are normally coordinated between each campus’s business incubator and its business school. The ITESM also offers a business-creation major, and regardless of major, students can take a semester-long course on business creation (different from the required entrepreneurship course) that guides them through the process of launching a company.
The BIN’s business-creation activities are layered, which creates a complex assemblage of assemblages. Campuses are divided into three categories based on the maturity of their local entrepreneurial ecosystem: Explorer, Medium, or Regional Leader. Campuses within a region maintain strong interrelationships with each other, communicating on a nearly daily basis. Each campus maintains a database of industry mentors, many of whom are ITESM graduates. There are five Regional Leader campuses, which oversee operations in that area (Querétaro was the leader for the region we visited). These campuses communicate frequently with the flagship Monterrey campus. Regional Leader campuses are also responsible for conducting research, which is strongly focused on creating technologies and products that can be commercialized. In total, the BIN offers hundreds of events and initiatives systemwide for supporting business creation and instilling an entrepreneurial spirit in their students. Overall, the university machinery at the ITESM is heavily geared toward launching and accelerating businesses.
The ITESM’s BIN is unique in important ways. First, the BIN, as an assemblage, relies on its students and alumni to a high degree—nearly all of the BIN employees we interviewed were ITESM graduates, and the industry mentors were mostly ITESM graduates as well. Next, at a molar level, the BIN displays an impressive consistency because of the continual communication between campuses and because it follows a singular incubation model, known as TecLean, which is used across all 18 of its incubators. The TecLean program was first developed at the ITESM Guadalajara campus, which then spread the model across the university system and throughout the country. TecLean was designed to be repeatable, and the BIN is the only ecosystem in our study that has had its incubation model described in academic articles (Cantú et al., 2009; Cantu-Ortiz et al., 2017; Guillén et al., 2010; Rice et al., 2014). TecLean itself is inspired by the lean start-up methodology that Ries (2011) popularized in The Lean Start-Up, and the ITESM has a long history of exporting its TecLean incubation model to other Latin American countries. The entrepreneurship professors and administrators we interviewed in Querétaro have been personally involved in traveling internationally to train Central and South American university administrators in the ITESM TecLean model. The BIN’s productivity is also noteworthy: The ITESM’s website notes that 71% of students currently own or have owned a business 25 years after graduation (Tecnológico de Monterey, n.d.).
Profile of CoMotion at the University of Washington
CoMotion at the University of Washington (UW) Seattle Campus was founded in 1982 and was originally called the Center for Commercialization. Initially, CoMotion focused on commercializing research conducted at the UW; however, in recent years, CoMotion has evolved into a major hub of innovation in the Seattle area and has helped drive the UW upward on lists that rank university innovation. For example, in 2018, Reuters named the UW the most innovative public university in the world. At the time of our interview with CoMotion senior manager Ashlee Esteban, there were 110 start-ups in CoMotion’s ecosystem, with a total of 416 people employed at those companies. From 2006 through 2016, CoMotion spun out 126 companies. In 2016 alone, 21 companies were spun out of CoMotion, and 536 patents were filed at the UW. CoMotion collaborates with the UW College of Engineering and other design or business-related academic programs at the UW to provide students with capstone project experiences working as interns in start-up companies. Also, CoMotion is currently working to establish an educational partnership with the UW Foster School of Business. Esteban reported that 43% of the people involved in CoMotion were directly affiliated with the UW. CoMotion does not track how many of their entrepreneurs are international, but Esteban said the number was small.
CoMotion includes three physical locations in Seattle, and each of these nodes focuses on the incubation of companies that reflect the main research areas at the UW. CoMotion hosts over 200 events each year and maintains a mentor database for connecting its start-ups with industry experts in Seattle. CoMotion and the UW, while important nodes in the overall entrepreneurial ecosystem in Seattle, are far from the only sources of innovation in the area. Seattle is a major hub for business activity, hosting enormous and innovative companies like Microsoft, Boeing, Starbucks, Costco, and Amazon. As a result, as an assemblage itself, CoMotion is constantly affected by the corporate assemblages around it. Internationally, CoMotion hosts educational programs for entrepreneurs from outside the United States who are interested in launching a business in the Seattle area. For example, CoMotion makes a special effort to reach out to entrepreneurs in Korea, hosting workshops one or two times a year aimed at their needs. Esteban reported that CoMotion is frequently contacted and visited by people who are interested in learning about the incubator. Some of these contacts are international, but Esteban told us that CoMotion has no explicit relationships with international partners who are using the incubation model inspired by CoMotion. Esteban said that the main goal of CoMotion is to strengthen Seattle’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and that the UBI does not have international ambitions even though its start-ups do.
CoMotion’s university-based entrepreneurial ecosystem is unique in two significant ways. First, unlike the other incubators we studied, its operations do not rely significantly on UW students and alumni. While a high number of students work as interns in CoMotion companies, few of the company founders are UW alumni. Furthermore, UW alumni also play a limited role within CoMotion’s ecosystem. When asked if students ever graduate from the UW and return to invest in companies or provide other valuable services, Esteban stated “that’s not happened, but…we would be super open to it.” Second, CoMotion is unique in how deeply it is rooted in the broader Seattle-area innovation network. For example, TechStars (a globally recognized acceleration network) has a strong presence at CoMotion, taking up most of the space at CoMotion Labs (one of the three main locations) when the accelerator is in session. In these ways, CoMotion is less reliant on university connections and resources for accomplishing its goals than are the other UBIs we studied.
Profile of University College Dublin’s NovaUCD
NovaUCD is located on the southeast corner of the University College Dublin (UCD) campus in an 18th century manor house (formerly known as Merville House). NovaUCD’s predecessor, the University Industry Programme, established in 1988, was based at the University Industry Centre, which opened in 1985 as a focal point for cooperation with industry. In 2003, NovaUCD was officially launched as a standalone incubator, and it has grown considerably since then. While visiting NovaUCD, we interviewed Tom Flanagan, the director of Enterprise and Commercialization. He told us that NovaUCD has supported over 360 companies and early-stage businesses. Each year it works with an average of 55 companies, with 35 housed in the NovaUCD facility and 20 located elsewhere on the UCD campus. NovaUCD provides offices, hot desks or hot spaces, and wet labs to its tenants. Their bioincubation facilities offer a range of amenities, from fridges to fume hoods to ice machines to deionized water. NovaUCD also has a variety of coworking spaces that encourage entrepreneurs to collaborate, build, prototype, and test products. Two wings of the facility, each larger than the original manor house, have been added, including a recent $7 million renovation and extension to the East Courtyard wing that has increased the facility’s capacity by 50%. NovaUCD has received significant funding from major Irish and international companies, including AIB, Arthur Cox, Deloitte, Ericsson, Goodbody Stockbrokers and Xilinx, and the Irish government through Enterprise Ireland (Engineers Ireland, 2019).
Of the UBIs we visited, NovaUCD operates in a way that is closest to a traditional business incubator. Entrepreneurs lease offices and lab spaces within the NovaUCD facility, much as they would in a traditional CBI. Meanwhile, the facility has several common spaces, such as a café, lobbies, courtyards, and workspaces, where entrepreneurs can mingle and interact. Flanagan mentioned that these spaces allow “collisions” to occur, during which entrepreneurs can share ideas and compare experiences. A majority of the entrepreneurs in NovaUCD have an existing relationship to UCD as faculty, students, and researchers; however, Flanagan pointed out, a significant number of “spin-in” companies are also brought into the incubator each year. Despite its connections to UCD, NovaUCD feels like it is operating independently because many of its entrepreneurs are working in the facility full time. And, Flanagan pointed out, companies that do not thrive or have plateaued tend to be moved out of the facility to make room for new start-ups. The facility itself creates a strong environment for collaboration, and we noticed an active entrepreneurial buzz. NovaUCD supports entrepreneurs with its annual VentureLaunch, and it provides regular seminars on raising capital, handling taxes, marketing, and managing intellectual property. Finally, NovaUCD works closely with university students through its Start-Up Stars Programme, using a “start it while you are here at UCD” approach to encourage them to launch their own companies.
One of the most interesting aspects of NovaUCD is its highly transnational approach to entrepreneurship. Flanagan explained that Ireland has not historically been a wealthy country, but over the past couple decades, Dublin has transformed itself into an international technology center due to Ireland’s success in attracting foreign direct investment; a talented, young, and adaptable workforce; and a favorable tax regime. As a result, Dublin has become one of the major data and technology centers in Europe. Dublin’s Silicon Docks region on the city’s east side houses the European headquarters for numerous multinational technology companies, such as Google, Airbnb, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, as well as many Ireland-born tech companies. Meanwhile, Microsoft has built a massive data center in southwest Dublin that serves much of Europe. Ireland is also attractive to high-tech companies because of its young and well-educated workforce that has low labor costs by European standards.
In our interview with Flanagan, a few transnational topics stood out. First, Flanagan stressed that Ireland naturally has a global perspective because of its relatively small economy. He pointed out that Ireland cannot view itself as a standalone market like the United States, the UK, China, or even continental Europe. Instead, all Irish start-ups and enterprise companies need to be constantly envisioning how to function transnationally and work within the global market. The Irish market, NovaUCD recognizes, is not large enough to sustain growth, so its entrepreneurs need to constantly look beyond Ireland’s shores for new opportunities. Second, a nation like Ireland, Flanagan explained, cannot be seen as offering state aid that solely benefits and promotes its own companies. The European Union (EU) grants “exceptions” to homegrown start-ups, but major conflicts of interest with other EU nations are taken to the EU courts in Brussels. As a result, Flanagan said, spinout companies (i.e., companies that emerge from the university) often have “boards of governance” that minimize risk and follow “good governance practices” that help avoid EU conflicts.
Third, he mentioned, entrepreneurs from incubators across Europe regularly participate in Knowledge Innovation Communities (KIC) run by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, an EU organization. The purpose of each KIC is to help entrepreneurs and start-ups collaborate across EU member nations by concentrating on a theme, such as energy, climate, health care, food, transportation, manufacturing, raw materials, and education. With a defined mission, each KIC is specifically designed to consider long-term horizons of 7–15 years but keep short-term, mid-term, and long-term objectives in mind (European Institute of Innovation and Technology, n.d.). KICs also help entrepreneurs and start-ups navigate the complex and evolving relationships that exist among EU nations. Entrepreneurs meet with investors, educators, subject-matter experts, researchers, businesses, and government and nongovernment organizations, partnering in ways that leverage their resources and experiences. Plus, KICs allow start-ups to avoid conflicts of interest that might cause them to run afoul of the EU courts in Brussels.
Overall, NovaUCD was the most oriented toward transnational networks when compared to the other UBIs we studied. The entrepreneurs and administrators at NovaUCD seemed to be always fostering and strengthening these transnational connections.
Profile of the Foundry at Purdue University
The Foundry, housed in the Convergence Center for Innovation and Collaboration at Purdue University, was founded in 2014 and has launched 224 new businesses. We interviewed Tim Peoples, the outgoing director, and he told us that the Foundry actively works with about 110 to 120 businesses per year. It launches about 45 businesses annually with 25 of them supporting Purdue intellectual property and 20 supporting non–Purdue intellectual property. About 95% of the Foundry’s start-ups, Peoples reported, have direct ties to Purdue faculty, researchers, and students, with local entrepreneurs making up the remaining 5%. Peoples mentioned that the Foundry also has an “academic mission” that involves teaching courses, both noncredit trainings and for-credit courses. The Foundry staff collaborates with the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, which coordinates many of the academic interactions between courses and programs on the Purdue campus. The staff also works with the Burton D. Morgan Center on hosting certificate programs for students. To reach students, the Foundry interacts with the Bechtel Innovation Design Center, a student-centered prototyping facility on campus, and the Anvil, a student makerspace on campus.
The support services provided by the Foundry are multifaceted. The Foundry provides free and low-cost trainings, such as its Firestarter program, that help entrepreneurs launch their companies. Its Firestarter program has become the basis of similar programs at other UBIs, including ones in other countries. Indeed, the Foundry is a regular stop for representatives from new and emerging UBIs who are looking for field-tested training programs that they can adopt themselves. This proliferation of the Foundry’s methods, to use the vocabulary of assemblage theory, has a territorializing affect, allowing the Foundry to have a significant impact on both domestic and transnational UBIs. Locally, the Foundry also creates networking opportunities for the public, including the Foundry Grounds, a weekly networking and educational meeting, and the Spirited Entrepreneur, a monthly networking outing at a local restaurant. The Foundry staff includes a cadre of EIRs who provide one-on-one mentoring for entrepreneurs going through the launch process. On site, entrepreneurs can meet with legal counselors, marketing specialists, grant writers, and technical writers who can help with developing business models, pitches, and canvases. When an entrepreneur completes a draft of a business model, the Foundry can make connections with angel investors and venture capitalists who are able to provide funding. Once a company is launched, the Foundry can help start-ups hire executives and specialists who can take up administrative roles in the company, including CEO, CTO, or COO. Finally, the Foundry can arrange office space, coworking space, and lab facilities for member companies, and it provides a J-1 Visa program to help nonimmigrant professors, researchers, and visitors work and develop businesses in the United States.
The Foundry relies on Purdue’s existing strengths and networks to support the entrepreneurial ecosystem that has grown up around Purdue and within the greater Indianapolis and Chicago areas. Because of Purdue’s strong transnational connections due to its engineering, technology, agriculture, life sciences, and business programs, the Foundry has access to existing transnational networks, especially in South America and Africa and increasingly in China and India. For this reason, the Foundry’s international outreach is significant. According to Peoples, about 20%–30% of the students involved with the Foundry are transnational, and 10%–15% of the companies working with the Foundry have a transnational component beyond exporting. In other words, these companies have operations that are housed both in the United States and other countries. The Foundry tends to use Purdue’s extensive alumni networks to connect with potential investors and mentors, typically, through e-mail and social media (especially Twitter and Instagram). Peoples explained that “alumni are often looking to give back to Purdue, and the Foundry is a good way for them to offer ‘brain capital’ that draws on their experiences as business leaders.” Some important nodes in the Foundry’s assemblage include alumni groups in China, South Korea, and Monterrey, Mexico. In the United States, another group of Purdue alumni, the Silicon Valley Boiler Innovation Group, is active in reaching back to the Foundry, and its members have strong transnational connections. Another important line of communication exists between the Foundry and African agricultural start-ups because agriculture is a core research area at Purdue.
During our interview, Peoples mentioned that one challenge facing transnational companies in the Foundry is adjusting to various cultural expectations. He pointed out that business rules in other countries tend to be similar to the ones followed in the United States; however, cultural differences can require some adjustments in how entrepreneurs manage employees and interact with suppliers and customers. Transnational companies do not necessarily require more time to launch, he said, but the management practices can be different, so these companies need to adjust to local practices and cultural expectations. Also, according to Peoples, transnational start-ups cannot “just open up shop and sell things” in the United States. They need to go through much more paperwork in order to register as a company that does business in the United States. Peoples said that international relationships are “extremely impacted by sales, distribution, manufacturing, and regulatory issues. All start-ups should think about international issues and how they will impact the business.”
The Foundry itself is evolving and growing as a central component of an ambitious new initiative at Purdue. In spring 2020, the Foundry moved to the new Convergence Center for Innovation and Collaboration, a much larger facility that has offices, hot desks and spaces, coworking spaces, and event venues. Near the Convergence Center is the Adaptive Lab+Studio building with wet labs, machining labs, robotic labs, and teaching and research laboratory modules. In a 2020 introduction to the Convergence Center, Paul Moses, assistant vice president of Purdue Research Parks and Business Development, offered an overview of the Foundry’s nodal position in the Discovery Park District, an interlinking ecosystem of entrepreneurial entities at Purdue. This ecosystem includes the Foundry, the Aerospace District, Railyard Co-Working Space, Purdue TechCenters, Purdue Research Park, and the Office of Technology Commercialization. Entrepreneurs will soon be able to live in the Discovery Park District in on-site houses and apartment buildings that also include retail stores, restaurants, bars, and cafes. Companies like Rolls Royce, SAAB Defense and Security, and Schweitzer Engineering Labs are currently building manufacturing and offices in the Aerospace District.
Results: How Does Assemblage Theory Explain Transnational UBIs?
Throughout our study of UBIs as transnational entrepreneurial assemblages, we noticed a few apparent trends as we traced the lines of communication and economies of affect that hold these UBI-centered ecosystems together: The UBIs’ process of exporting incubation models territorializes entrepreneurial assemblages on a transnational scale by building and fostering communication lines between the entrepreneurs, start-ups, and UBIs. UBIs train transnational entrepreneurs in specific social codes and parameters, building transnational relationships by relaying rules and conventions, traditions, procedures, and processes. Current students and alumni play important roles in establishing and maintaining an economy of affect and lines of communication that forge material entrepreneurial networks connected to each UBI. The genres and conventions of entrepreneurship, as codes of business and technical communication, provide common language practices that UBIs use to facilitate entrepreneurs’ navigation of the evolving innovation-centered ecosystems in which they are situated.
Ultimately, UBIs are assemblages that work on a transnational level and scale in a self-organizing way and are continuously in a process of becoming. Because UBIs are assemblages within larger assemblages, they are always growing, changing, and remaking themselves to fit the material conditions around them. As a result, because they have agency as assemblages. UBIs and the start-ups they launch are living multiplicities that evolve as emerging and exterior pressures are put upon them.
Transnational Relationships Between University-Managed Incubators: Exporting Incubation Models
We observed that some established UBIs export their incubation models to emerging UBIs, which is a way of territorializing and one of the most common ways of building transnational relationships between UBIs. By exporting their models, established UBIs are able to code other entrepreneurial assemblages, helping emerging UBIs build their identities through common genres, conventions, and terminology. This territorializing is a friendly, not hostile, act. Indeed, these relationships are normally initiated by a newer or emerging UBI that wants to adopt the established incubator’s methods; meanwhile, the more established UBI promotes its methods and usually charges a fee for the training. The transformative nature of these relationships on emerging incubators demonstrates an economy of affect in which one assemblage shapes the identity and processes of other entrepreneurial assemblages.
For example, in our research, we observed these territorializing flows moving from the Foundry to Florida, Nepal, Africa, and two locations in India. In these instances, the relationships consisted of entrepreneurs and administrators visiting the Foundry for site visits or training and the Foundry staffers leaving the country to train key agents at the newer incubators. Online courses were also used to territorialize these new spaces. Its outgoing director, Peoples, likened the use of online courses by new UBIs to “buying [the Foundry’s] textbook.” The ITESM’s BIN was most active with this form of transnational territorialization, especially in Central and South America. The ITESM first exported its TecLean incubation model in 2005, and since then, it has territorialized UBIs all through Latin America. This territorializing has allowed emerging UBIs in Central and South America to improve their business-generation capabilities (Guillen et al., 2010). The ITESM also has a large yearly event called INCmty at which entrepreneurs or organizations learn about entrepreneurship at the ITESM (including its incubation model) and bring back best practices (codes) to their own UBIs (i.e., assemblages). As more established UBI assemblages territorialize less established ones, molar transnational assemblages emerge with a new capability—transferring effective business practices from one country to another.
We observed, however, that these business practices are not adopted wholesale from one UBI to another. An established UBI does indeed territorialize and code many elements of the emerging UBI, but this process is best described as “overcoding” (DeLanda, 2016, p. 23; Deleuze & Guattari, 1989, p. 448) because the emerging UBI retains many of its previous codes that reflect the norms and conventions of its local city, state, and nation. Overcoding creates a layer of new codes that are placed on top of the previous codes. Therefore, when entrepreneurial models are exported transnationally, they are often adjusted to fit the codes of the receiving local communities. UBIs that are experienced in territorializing transnational spaces usually help the emerging incubator adjust these codes through a localization process. The ITESM, for example, has a 1-year agreement with new incubators during which its personnel learn what they can about the newer UBIs so that they can create a set of practices and procedures that work for their locality. The Foundry also monitors and provides ongoing feedback to the incubators it is working with. This give-and-take of practices strengthens and maintains these new lines of communication between various nodes of the molar transnational assemblage of entrepreneurs.
Training Transnational Entrepreneurs to Build Relationships Between UBIs
Another important way of achieving transnational territorialization is by training entrepreneurs from other counties. For example, CoMotion has a training program for Korean entrepreneurs who want to become entrepreneurs in Seattle. These entrepreneurs travel from Korea to Seattle and complete specially designed educational courses about entrepreneurial practices and communication in the United States. Similarly, at Purdue, with the third-highest population of international students of any U.S. university, the Foundry also provides training to transnational entrepreneurs. Purdue’s strengths in engineering and agriculture create opportunities for exchanges between entrepreneurs, faculty, and students from China, India, and Africa. These training programs teach transnational entrepreneurs how to use the codes of the entrepreneurial assemblages in America. Students take these codes back to their home countries by learning the genres, conventions, and terminology used at the Foundry.
UBIs also territorialize spaces around their university by training transnational entrepreneurs who will launch their start-ups on or near the campus. In the CoMotion program, for example, entrepreneurs who complete the training learn to be an entrepreneur specifically in Seattle as well as North America. Similarly, entrepreneurs who train at the Foundry are encouraged to start a business in the United States, preferably in the Midwest. Many of the practices that an entrepreneur learns at a UBI depend on local business laws and customs. Even so, entrepreneurs trained outside their home country are far more likely to become transnational entrepreneurs who regularly operate within one or more nodes of the assemblage on an ongoing basis, which territorializes on a wider scale.
These transnational entrepreneurs also create relationships that increase the capabilities of individual UBI assemblages as well. For instance, a number of alumni transnational entrepreneurs and administrators stop by the Foundry when they are visiting the United States. These alumni of the Foundry’s training program often provide educational presentations or information about their start-ups at the Foundry’s networking events. As a result, new expertise and connections become available to the Foundry’s start-ups because of the links established by these training programs.
In contrast, NovaUCD’s relationships with other European UBIs seemed to be an example of a larger assemblage (the EU) territorializing the entrepreneurial ecosystem by exerting its own codes. Because of the cooperative nature of the EU, NovaUCD seemed to be actively reaching out to other UBIs and CBIs to ensure that their practices and start-ups were in compliance with EU rules and agreements. This approach was most apparent in the EU’s use of Knowledge Innovation Communities (KIC) not only to foster innovation but also to manage the full impulses of capitalism. By attending KICs, entrepreneurs and start-ups could take advantage of training and knowledge provided by investors, educators, subject-matter experts, researchers, businesses, and government and nongovernment organizations. The secondary effect of KICs, though, was to encourage European start-ups to compete together to solve larger problems rather than to always compete against each other. The KICs are designed to solve major problems (energy, climate, health care, food, transportation, manufacturing, raw materials, and education) that would be far beyond the capabilities of individual entrepreneurs and start-ups. By hosting KICs, the EU’s European Institute of Innovation and Technology seemed to be using a form of soft coding to encourage collaboration and a common identity among entrepreneurs.
A harder form of coding in UBIs, such as what we observed at NovaUCD, was the coding needed to comply with EU state-aid rules. To stay in compliance, NovaUCD helps its start-ups establish boards of governance and other mechanisms to preclude legal complaints by other EU nations that it is favoring its own home-grown industries. In this way, we believe, the EU as an assemblage is territorializing and coding the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and UBIs such as NovaUCD help academic entrepreneurs and start-ups navigate those codes. The use of KICs and boards of governance demonstrates a different approach than that of UBIs in the United States, where the general assumption is that businesses are competing against others and trying to disrupt industries while garnering as much market share as possible rather than competing with other start-ups to solve larger problems.
The Special Role of Students and Alumni in UBIs as Assemblages
In most UBIs, students play an important role in strengthening and expanding UBI assemblages. This occurs in two distinct ways. Students collaborate with and within the UBI and eventually graduate, growing the number of loyal agents who are part of the assemblage. As an illustration of this loyalty, at the ITESM, the key agents who make up its molar entrepreneurial assemblage tend to be ITESM graduates. The only employees and mentors in its ecosystems who are not ITESM alumni seemed to be the PhD researchers hired from globally prestigious universities in order to gain the advanced expertise required to generate technologically innovative businesses. In addition to becoming UBI employees or industry mentors, ITESM graduates frequently fill roles in Mexico’s government, creating important connections and capabilities that directly benefit the ITESM. Similarly at Purdue, the Foundry’s assemblage is densely populated with Purdue graduates who are loyal to the university. These graduates provide value to the Foundry by mentoring start-ups, investing in start-ups, and providing expertise. In short, UBIs harness the resources of the university to populate and replenish the assemblage with productive agents and relationships. As a different example, the start-ups at NovaUCD regularly built in a pro-Ireland angle to their marketing. Perhaps these references to Ireland are intended to attract local investors and customers by appealing to patriotic motives and national pride, but to us, the NovaUCD entrepreneurs seemed to be truly motivated by loyalty to Ireland and the idea that they were building companies that would strengthen Ireland’s economy.
Alumni can also serve to make an assemblage’s network larger by connecting the assemblage to nodes in new locales. Our evidence indicates that UBIs that are located outside hubs of innovation might have even stronger and broader transnational lines of communication than do UBIs located in centers of entrepreneurial activity. The main example of this pattern was at the Foundry. Located at a university in rural Indiana with a large population of international students and faculty, the Foundry launches companies by alumni who are dispersed across the world after they graduate. These alumni find each other and form nodes in innovation-focused areas such as Seoul, Silicon Valley, South Africa, Colombia, and Mumbai, and then these nodes create lines of communication back to the Foundry. These alumni networks are formed with little or no effort from the Foundry. Alumni, as Peoples pointed out, are often eager to give “brain capital” back to Purdue. A contrasting example that also supports our point is CoMotion. After graduating from CoMotion, transnational entrepreneurs often stay in the Seattle area, a strong hub of business and innovation. These transnational entrepreneurs, as agents, expand CoMotion’s lines of communication to their home countries, forming transnational nodes.
Genres and Conventions That Code and Facilitate International Relationships
A high degree of territorialization is facilitated by the commonly employed genres and conventions of entrepreneurship that are used to code entrepreneurial assemblages. An important aspect of this coding is the common media that are consumed throughout the molar assemblage. Basically, even outside the United States, entrepreneurs read many of the same books and blogs and listen to the same podcasts, making it easier for entrepreneurs, investors, UBIs, CBIs, and other agents to connect and communicate globally with each other. To illustrate this pattern, CoMotion maintains a list of the most popular entrepreneurial media in their ecosystem. The book voted as most important (described by CoMotion’s Esteban as “the start-up bible”) was The Lean Start-Up by Ries (2011), the same book that inspired the TecLean program 2,600 miles away in Guadalajara, which ended up spreading across the entire ITESM assemblage. The habits of entrepreneurs at the ITESM are influenced by the “lean methodology” popularized in Ries’s book, but this methodology also influences the activities of market validation and product iteration globally. Indeed, a survey of UBI administrators would probably show that they have all read the same dozen or so books.
The use of shared genres, conventions, and terminology (i.e., codes) supports networking within the molar assemblage. These shared communication practices amount to an emerging lingua franca of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs, on a global scale, understand and use coded terminology, such as “lean methodology,” “value proposition,” “go-to market strategy,” and “minimum viable product,” which creates stronger connections between widely spread nodes. Coding also occurs through common genres (e.g., business models, elevator pitches, canvases, patent applications, specifications, protocols) that facilitate interactions and strengthen the links between transnational assemblages. Of course, this lingua franca is concurrent with the global use of English for business—all ITESM administrators, professors, and entrepreneurs we interviewed spoke fluent or nearly fluent English. This pattern territorializes and slowly pulls together entrepreneurs into an increasingly homogenous and well-connected global assemblage. The high degree of coding across the molar assemblage imparts capabilities that were probably not possible a decade or two ago, such as international pitch competitions like the International Business Model Competition and other international entrepreneurial events like INCmty.
Looking Forward: The Future of University-Based Transnational Networks
Traditionally, universities have had two main missions: teaching and research. Today, the university’s “third mission,” according to Siegel and Wright (2015), is stimulating and building their local and national economies through business creation. We think that the integration of this third mission will become more prevalent at research universities and community colleges, especially as the workplace becomes more digital, automated, and global. As we have demonstrated in this article, UBIs possess the unique ability to harness the creativity and industry of faculty, researchers, alumni, and students in order to generate strong, productive entrepreneurial networks worldwide. These networks are enhanced by being closely connected to commercializable research and the infrastructure needed to launch new businesses. Therefore, we believe that UBIs will become more influential in the arena of entrepreneurship as a whole. Examples of this emerging dynamic include the ITESM, which is generating such a high number of businesses, and NovaUCD, which is exerting a growing influence in the Irish and European economy.
We recognize that most of our findings can likely be applied to traditional CBIs, not only UBIs. Indeed, we predict that both UBIs and CBIs will more frequently export incubation models to up-and-coming incubators. This form of territorialization allows communities to more effectively generate and sustain new businesses. It also enhances the prestige and revenue of existing incubators. Furthermore, we believe that both UBIs and CBIs will communicate and collaborate with each other to share not only incubation strategies but also industry mentors and training programs. This sharing will include the hosting of collaborative entrepreneur initiatives and events like the ITESM’s INCmty and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology’s KICs. Meanwhile, a university with a network of campuses spread across its state, its nation, or perhaps even its continent has the built-in potential to create an expansive entrepreneurial assemblage that has many and widely dispersed physical locations. The ITESM demonstrates this potential most fully—it has created more businesses per student than have the other UBIs we studied. We think it is not coincidental that the ITESM also possesses the widest and most territorialized network with the most UBIs working synchronously. If more UBIs could establish networks similar to the ITESM but on a global scale, the economic benefits would be substantial.
We also predict that transnational relationships between UBIs and CBIs will become stronger, more productive, and easier to cultivate as common genres, conventions, and terminology continue to facilitate seamless communication. Increasingly, incubators of all types will use business and technical communication genres and conventions to establish these transnational relationships. An important area of further research, then, would be to analyze the global language practices and consumption of common media in the entrepreneurial ecosystem and how these practices code and overcode international interactions. It would be illuminating to study how widespread these practices are; how genre usage, conventions, and terminologies differ between cultures; and how the consumption of entrepreneurial media affects and supports these patterns.
Finally, we predict that business and technical communication students will increasingly need to know how to operate in entrepreneurial workplaces both locally and transnationally. All courses in business and technical communication should teach students how entrepreneurs operate, as well as the genres and conventions that structure and code the assemblages that make up today’s transnational workplaces.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.