Inventors and Entrepreneurs in Academia: What Types of Skills and Experience Matter?

Abstract

This paper aims to improve our understanding of the attributes of academic researchers that influence the capacity to contribute to technical advance, by either adding to the pool of technological opportunities available to industry or engaging in the exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities themselves. We investigate a number of factors associated with the skills developed by academic researchers. We find that contributions to the pool of technological opportunities and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities in some cases are shaped by different factors and in others have common determinants. Our results show that contributions to technological opportunities are driven by the scientist’s academic research excellence and previous discovery of technological opportunities, while exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities is driven by previous collaboration with industry partners, scientific breadth and previous technological discovery experience.

Keywords: technological opportunities, entrepreneurial opportunities, discovery and exploitation, research skills, collaboration experience with industry, academic entrepreneurship, spin-offs, patenting