Organizer: Shaker A. Zahra, U. of Minnesota
Organizer: Daniela Baglieri, U. of Messina
Participant: Maria Teresa Bolivar Ramos, Autonomous U. of Barcelona
Participant: Rosa Grimaldi, Alma Mater Studiorum U. di Bologna
Participant: Daniel Hjorth, Copenhagen Business School
Participant: Liudvika Leisyte, TU Dortmund U.
Participant: Donald Siegel, U. at Albany - State U. of New York
Participant: Mike Wright, Imperial College London
Participant: Daniela Baglieri, U. of Messina
Participant: Shaker A. Zahra, U. of Minnesota
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| The role of the university in promoting technological and economic development is now widely recognized around the globe (Wright, 2014). However, while some universities were highly effective, many technology transfer offices (TTOs) were inefficient, and lacking in resources and capabilities to be successful in this arena (Siegel &Wright, 2015). In particular, TTOs often lack knowledge conversion capability (Zahra et al., 2007), which helps their stakeholders in “converting” inventions into profitable products.. Several reasons may explain this lack of ability. First, technological innovation mostly requires cross-domain collaboration to recombine different scientific background (Vural et al., 2013). Accordingly, university departments become crucial in promoting this collaboration, providing incentives and mechanisms to support academic entrepreneurship (Fini et al., 2014). Second, the emergence of new technologies like digital prototyping is shortening the life cycles of products, and opening innovations to users, inventors and to the local community. New forms of academic entrepreneurship are emerging (Link et al., 2015) and this involves that universities should rethink their social identities, the role of business schools, and the university education as well. Third, the configuration of entrepreneurial ecosystem is evolving as well. Universities can play a key role if they devote more innovative efforts opening their governance to address the new challenges stemming from, among others, big data, crowdfunding, both at individual and organizational levels. This session brings together a group of researchers interested in these issues to describe the potential to be realized from broadening our definition of the role of universities as entrepreneurial hubs. |