Andrew C. Corbett - Academic Entrepreneurship. Creating an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

ACADEMIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP: CREATING AN ENTREPRENEURIAL ECOSYSTEM

Series Editors: Jerome A. Katz and Andrew C. Corbett

Recent Volumes:

ADVANCES IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP, FIRM EMERGENCE AND GROWTH VOLUME 16

EDITED BY

ANDREW C. CORBETT

Babson College, Babson Park, MA, USA

DONALD S. SIEGEL

University at Albany, New York, NY, USA

JEROME A. KATZ

Cook School of Business, Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, MO, USA

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First edition 2014

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ISBN: 978-1-78350-984-3

ISSN: 1074-7540 (Series)

Mary L. Walshok and Josh D. Shapiro

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Deborah Shepherd and Christine Woods

Bruce Kingma

Paul Miesing, Mingfeng Tang and Mingfang Li

Karin Hellerstedt, Karl Wennberg and Lars Frederiksen

Jonas Gabrielsson, Diamanto Politis and sa Lindholm Dahlstrand

Clare Gately and James Cunningham

There have always been academic entrepreneurs. The creation of the first universities depended on the patronage of powerful and wealthy individuals, and these were courted by academics seeking to create these institutions of higher learning (). At all points in history, patronage depended in part on a quid pro quo in which academics created works of value to the larger society in the arts, sciences, philosophies, and later in the social sciences.

A uniquely American approach to academic entrepreneurship came with the invention of the agricultural college in the 19th century, where through the Hatch Act the government created a national initiative to promote technology development and transfer in scientific agricultural methods from land-grant universities to their communities and the nation as a whole (). This policy efforts success depended on academic entrepreneurs who operationalized the nascent policies and actually delivered the inventions and service delivery platforms to take academic ideas and put them into practice. The success of this practice led to the U.S. government growing its support of research and commercialization in academia, although it could be generally argued that research far outpaced commercialization in legislation and practice.

That is, until 1980, when the U.S. Congress enacted the BayhDole Act, landmark legislation that dramatically changed intellectual property rights related to the commercialization of university-based inventions. BayhDole instituted a uniform patent policy across federal agencies, removed many restrictions on licensing, and allowed universities to own patents arising from federal research grants. The senators who designed this legislation asserted that university ownership and management of intellectual property would stimulate the commercialization of new technologies and promote economic development and the overall competitiveness of the American economy.