Department of Strategy & Policy

A short report from Ruan Yi on her research findings presented in the conference.

From left Anna, Aegean, Ruan Yi, Zheng Weiting and Xu Weiwei

The increase of technology commercialisation in university has raised concerns that the research orientation of university researchers might be disturbed by developing application for their inventions and entrepreneurial activity. Empirical evidence on this concern is ambiguous and mainly in the U.S. context. Drawing on data from National University of Singapore, we examine the relationship between academic publication productivity, patenting involvement, and entrepreneurial propensity of university researchers. We find that patenting and academic publication are complements rather than substitutes, but further involvement in entrepreneurial pursuits may lead to decrease of publication. We also find that among university patent inventors, full professors are the most likely to start up new ventures.

Ms Els from Ghent University presented a paper about how the scope and newness of the endowed technology predict the post-spin-off growth for corporate and university spin-offs; whereas Ms Mateja from University of Ljubljana shared her study about specific determinants and processes that characterize emergence of academic entrepreneurial intentions that lead to spin-off companies in two European settings. I found Ms. Els’ research question to be quite intriguing as she incorporates the characteristics of technology to explain the performance of university spinoffs and the comparison between corporate and university spin-offs is also quite interesting. The idea of the other paper is quite close to what I am studying in my thesis and hence I also learned some data collection and analysis methods from it. But overall I found that the framework of that paper to be of no surprises which also made me re-consider my consider my own framework.