Oggi ospitiamo con grande piacere le riflessioni di Riccardo Fini in tema di Imprenditorialità Accademica, un’area di ricerca in grande fermento e di assoluto interesse per chi si occupa di Imprenditorialità e Innovazione. Riccardo è ricercatore presso l’Imperial College e si occupa da alcuni anni di questo affascinante fenomeno. A seguire ha sintetizzato per noi i risultati di un suo study recently published and which was also discussed in the prestigious journal Nature . So, Richard, to you the word!
Creating Enterprise in academic
Over the past ten years, in all industrialized countries, the universities have been under massive pressure from 'Public opinion and the politicians themselves about the need to maintain high levels of productivity in the face of greater rationalization of input factors. In addition, following the recent global financial crisis, as evidenced by recent events in the UK, universities have had to manage a large reduction in public funding for research and at the same time, following pressure from the political world, to emphasize the applied research activities in an attempt to increase the cash receipts arising from the commercialization of university research (OECD, 2009).
As a result, university administrators and politicians themselves have invested a considerable amount of resources to enact and support technology transfer activities (Knowledge Transfer Activities - KTA) on the part of academics. For example, the United States, two of the most important laws of KTA, the Bayle-Dole Act and the Stevenson-Wydler Act, were enacted in the early '80s, and have made possible and guaranteed to universities and government laboratories can to patent their research results, taking possession of any royalties arising from the commercialization of technology. Other nations have invested in similar reforms, such as the reform of the university system in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands in the 90s, the so-called Loi Allegre introduced in 1999 in France, and the introduction of specific laws by the Swedish government to ' early 80s. More recently, in Italy, has witnessed the creation of a new institutional system (following the introduction of Law 297 in 1999), which allowed the transfer of certain executive powers from central government to individual universities, emphasizing the business practices within of each institution.
The KTA can arise as a result of two processes markedly different. Some of them refer to those areas where progress in scientific knowledge is mainly due to the introduction of new practices and methodologies that arise sudden changes and discontinuities technological scenarios in the reference. This occurs in those technology areas such as pharmaceuticals and biotechnology that are characterized by high appropriability regimes, where there is the possibility of protecting technological innovation through the use of intellectual property. The commercialization of university research results is, in this case, through the practice of patenting, the granting of technology licenses and through the creation of new enterprises based on patented technology (IP-based KTA). In other cases, however, the KTA are primarily originated through the recombination of existing knowledge, seeking solutions to problems through the use of previous discoveries, rather than new technological paradigms. This occurs mainly in the natural and social sciences, through consultancy and collaboration between universities and business (not IP-based KTA).
Despite the documented heterogeneity, most studies focused on KTA-based technology protected by intellectual property rights. Therefore, to date, there are still many gaps on the state of the art knowledge. First, we do not know the extent of the phenomenon, not knowing what percentage of the KTA occur inside and outside the system of intellectual property. We have no further information about the differential impact and effectiveness of university support mechanisms on the activation of both types of KTA. Because of the paucity of such data, in many cases it was verified that the university administrators and policy-oriented mechanisms have emphasized the protection of university intellectual property, considering the university as a true private enterprise, rather than support and allow for greater sharing of knowledge between universities and the market. In an effort to protect and exploit the knowledge developed in universities, such practices have originated, Paradoxically, a reduction of collaborations between companies and universities, as documented in the literature.
In the article entitled "Inside or Outside the IP-System. Business Creation in Academia "appeared in Research Policy in 2010, we sought to contribute to this debate by showing how the United States, spin-offs that come down the commercialization of technology protected by intellectual property rights are based on a kind of knowledge restricted to a few areas of science (as compared with those that arise outside the IP system). The study, conducted in 2007, and 'based on a sample of 11,572 individuals, representative of the entire population of the U.S. academic (58 646) . The results show that study participants have founded 1,948 companies, of which 682 are based on technology patented and the remaining 1,266 no. This trend once again testifies to the fact that if the attention and support to the practice of transfer of academic knowledge is focused on the only domains in which scientific knowledge is actually patentable, an entire part KTA of them could be severely damaged.
Further reading
Baldini, N., Grimaldi, R., e Sobrero, M., 2006. Institutional changes and the commercialization of academic knowledge: A study of Italian universities’ patenting activities between 1965 and 2002. Research Policy, 35, 518–532.
Fini R., Grimaldi R., e Sobrero M., 2009. Factors Fostering Academics to Start up New Ventures: an Assessment of Italian Founders' Incentives, Journal of Technology Transfer, 34, 380-402.
OECD, 2009. OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2009, OECD Publishing.
Rothaermel, F., Agung, D., and Jiang, L., 2007. University entrepreneurship: a taxonomy of the literature. Industrial and Corporate Change 16, 691-791.
Shane, S., (Ed.) 2004. Academic entrepreneurship: University spin-offs and wealth creation. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
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