Industry and Higher Education

In today's globalizing and hypercompetitive marketplace, knowledge and learning are the only capabilities that can provide sustained competitive advantage. ‘Knowledge’ is the content of learning, and a firm gains competitive superiority either by knowing something that its competitors do not know or by having a certain type of knowledge that cannot easily be replicated. ‘Learning’ is the process of gaining new knowledge, so that the firm is constantly accumulating and assimilating knowledge and this becomes the basis for creating and improving organizational routines. Learning is the also the basis of what strategists are calling firms' ‘dynamic capabilities’ (Tushman and Rosenkopf, 1992), which enable them to build new competences in an evolutionary cycle to maintain an edge in an ever-changing industrial environment. This paper explores conceptually and attempts to validate empirically the nature and dynamics of strategic knowledge arbitrage and serendipity (SKARSE) as real options drivers (RODs). The author reviews and assesses how, why and when SKARSE serve as high value adding RODs and identifies critical success and failure factors in designing and implementing real options that leverage SKARSE. He also examines the lessons learned from actual mergers and acquisitions. Finally, he addresses the operation of SKARSE in the context of a complex evolutionary ecosystem shaped by the dynamics of co-opetition, co-evolution and co-specialization.

High-expectation start-ups are firms launched by entrepreneurs with high ambitions for growth. The encounter between new technology and entrepreneurship that characterizes such new ventures has a significant impact on the nature and speed of economic development, driving the growth of high-technology industries and helping to make the economic system open, complex and adaptive. Thus high-expectation entrepreneurship deserves special attention in entrepreneurship education. This paper introduces and explains the importance of high-expectation entrepreneurship. Then, using an approach borrowed from both experimental scientific research and the practice of medicine, the authors propose a form of business idea testing and entrepreneur training in a laboratory environment. The ability to transpose, test and iterate new ideas and models in a business laboratory has significant potential in terms of promoting rapid learning and the preliminary validation of a new business idea – thus cutting risk, reducing cost and maximizing revenue potential. The authors argue that this approach is far more appropriate for entrepreneurship development in the new economic environment than traditional business education models.

Cognitive economics is the fruit of intense ‘trans-epistemic’ communication involving heterogeneous disciplinary areas: its most tangible application can be found in the dialogues between science and enterprise and in the relationship between cognition and entrepreneurship. The hypothesis of classical economics is that the academic inventor or corporate scientist operates under conditions of substantial rationality during the process of knowledge transfer from research to enterprise. The reality, however, is that their actions owe much to spontaneity and unpredictability, deriving from their personal knowledge set and from the opportunities for dynamic learning and for relationships with other individuals offered by laboratory life. The cognitive matrix of academic spin-offs is therefore complex and, if there is to be effective connection with people and innovative organizations capable of enhancing their prospects of success, the old vision that is confined to one-dimensional aspects of the entrepreneurial phenomenon must be rejected. There is thus a need for an integrated study which simultaneously takes into account the particular context, the business model and the individual mechanisms of sharing and transferring knowledge.

During the transformation process from a command economy, the extraordinary statist university–industry–government (UIG) linkages model was replaced by an extreme version of laissez-faire relationships. A more modern interaction-based UIG model could be implemented only by changing the whole national innovation system of catching-up economies. The national innovation systems of countries with a command economy past share common problems that prevent them from developing the UIG linkages. The still-dominating linear innovation model should be replaced with the interactive and learning-based approach as these countries need to improve their levels of innovation diffusion management and networking. In addition, a symbiotic approach to the balance of high-tech and low-tech industries is needed. Managerial and organizational competence should be improved and treated at the same level of importance as technological competence.

International entrepreneurship and knowledge-based entrepreneurship have recently generated considerable academic and non-academic attention. This paper explores the ‘new’ field of knowledge-based entrepreneurship in a boundless research system. Cultural barriers to the development of business opportunities by researchers persist in some academic contexts, where the focus is on ‘pure’ research rather than the exploitation of results. The promotion of ‘invisible networks’ of peers and the provision by higher education institutions of the kind of entrepreneurship education needed by scientists if they are to transform their research results into successful businesses are among the appropriate strategies to connect research with entrepreneurship in an international context.

Why do inventors and top scientists from leading universities exploit their research results differently from others? Why do apparently similar laboratory experiences make ‘academic entrepreneurs’ achieve different entrepreneurial goals? Does the academic experience have an influence on the willingness to spin off? Or is that willingness simply driven by the possession of a particular scientific formula? The principal aim of this study is to answer these questions by examining the conditions under which academic scientists can commercialize their knowledge through an entrepreneurial development of their scientific results in the form of spin-off firms.

Lipidomics is an emerging discipline in life sciences related to the lipid metabolism of living organisms. In the last decade chemical and biological research has attributed very important roles to membrane phospholipids in relationship to free radical stress and metabolic situations. An entrepreneurial initiative for diagnostic tools and health care products in the field of lipidomics started two years ago in Italy as a spin-off company of the National Council of Research. This paper presents an overview of the lipidomic approach applied in the company with regard to the metabolic and functional status of cell membranes, including the development of medical diagnostic tools and an innovative consultancy for nutraceutical companies. The authors also comment on the entrepreneurial experience of the Italian researchers.

This paper analyses the role of universities in supporting local agroindustry using the case of the Piceno agroindustrial district in Italy. Emerging countries' comparative advantages, made stronger by increased international trade and the rediscovery of local traditions and typicality, do not signify that there will be a less knowledge-intensive agroindustry in the future. On the contrary, only those SMEs with consolidated competitive advantages, based on knowledge embodied in highly-qualified employees, will be able to exploit the new comparative advantages made available by delocalization and take full advantage of the economic potential of typicality. Peripheral universities play a first-mover role in training and creating dynamic linkages with local governments and local agroindustry.

This paper first examines key differences between the traditional approaches of the USA and Italy in relation to innovation and entrepreneurship. The authors then turn to the specific example of southern Italy, which has experienced higher rates of unemployment, lower US investment and fewer educational and cultural exchanges than the rest of the country. After setting out various reasons behind the relative lack of development of the Italian South, the authors describe how cross-cultural programmes can help such regions to realize their potential for economic growth through innovation and entrepreneurship. Using the case of the US Mission in Italy's ‘Partnership for Growth’ programme and brief case studies of outstanding research commercialization in southern Italy, they show how the aims and activities of the programme fuse with the potential of research in the region which has traditionally been underexploited.

In an attempt to diversify the economy and stimulate private enterprise development, government agencies and private institutions in many countries have emphasized the importance of setting up and developing small and medium-size enterprises and promoting entrepreneurship. An important question confronting policy makers, however, is how they can both promote local economic growth and enhance social development. Undergraduate and graduate business education is seen as a prerequisite if the objectives of economic growth are to be realized. This paper calls for a serious evaluation of current business education, particularly in Middle Eastern countries. As US business schools start to encounter numerous problems concerning the validity and viability of business courses and their methods of delivery, critical debates have arisen. The overwhelming majority of business schools in the Middle East are imitations of US schools and hence suffer similar problems. This paper seeks to raise awareness of such debates to stimulate more discussion and so to address issues of concern. Research propositions are formulated to serve as a basis for phase two of this study, which will involve empirical data collection. Thus the contribution of the paper lies in the adaptation of established knowledge and theory to meet specific challenges in the emerging economies of countries in the Middle East and beyond.

Students at Jönköping University are encouraged to start their own businesses in parallel with their studies, and the university offers support as part of its encouragement. Jönköping students currently start up around 50 firms each year. These start-ups account for about 15 per cent of the new firms in the local community and they also bring other benefits to the region. Support for the student businesses is provided by the Business Lab section of Science Park Jönköping. The support system is open and student-driven: it is always available, there is no selection of ideas or people, and its direction and pace are to a large degree determined by the students themselves. In addition, the general business coaches are close to both the student and the business culture, there is no separate ‘coach culture’, and the support system is well integrated into the science park. These success factors are incorporated into a general model of the meeting between two cultures, viewed as a value-creating process that changes character over time.