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The purpose of this thesis is to identify patents invented by researchers at Lund University, to describe the university inventors, and to understand the main factors that influence their patenting activities. The analysis focuses on inventors in relation to their environment. A number of factors influence scientists’ decisions to patent. Internal factors related to individuals such as solving the research puzzle, demonstrating the quality and novelty of the research, and enhancing professional reputation are the main internal factors that trigger researchers to patent. Although external factors such as TTOs and the Third Task are relatively more important for some inventors, internal factors are still the predominant factors. The thesis has also suggested a typology of inventors to show the differences in the level of patenting and in the way they applied for patent and commercialized. This nuanced heterogeneity among inventors emphasizes the need for caution in generalizations, especially regarding the roles and influences of patent legislation and TTOs in university patenting. Adaptive and flexible institutions and organizations may enable scientists to patent by providing them with the necessary resources and skills they may need for patenting rather than applying standard solutions to different cases. This study has made empirical and theoretical contributions to the literature by developing a focus on individual inventors and by emphasizing the characteristics of these inventors and of their external environments. Hence, this dissertation may provide both theoretical insights and empirical evidence to scholars investigating university patenting and inventors. It may also provide insights to policy makers and university administrators on the appropriate roles of institutions and organizations in promoting and assisting patenting activities of university researchers.

Ausgründungen aus der Wissenschaft (spin-offs) gehören zu den anspruchsvollsten Instrumenten des Wissens- und Technologietransfers. Die Initiatoren erfolgreicher Gründungsvorhaben sind oftmals engagierte Hochschullehrer, die nicht nur Anerkennung in der Scientific Community suchen, sondern ihre Forschungsergebnisse ebenso in anwendungsorientierte Produkte und Dienstleistungen überführen. Was treibt diese Wissenschaftler an? In welchem Zusammenhang steht die Gründungsmotivation mit der ursprünglichen wissenschaftlichen Motivation? Ist das Initiieren einer Ausgründung mehr als das Lösen eines herausfordernden Rätsels? Der vorliegende Artikel gibt eine Antwort auf diese Fragen und gewährt einen Einblick in die Gründungsmotivation von Hochschulprofessoren aus den Naturwissenschaften. Mit Hilfe einer qualitativen Untersuchung werden verschiedene Gründertypen gebildet.

Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, 2006. / Not embargoed. Vita. Bibliography: 69-71.

Master of Science / Department of Agricultural Economics / Vincent R. Amanor-Boadu / Interest in commercialization of university research has accelerated since the Bayh-Dole Act (1980) granted authority to universities and federally-funded nonprofit institutions, among others, to obtain patents, grant licenses, and transfer custody of patents with the explicit purpose of promoting the utilization and marketing of their inventions. This interest is supported by these institutions' need to expand their funding sources as growth in their traditional funding has lagged their needs. This study seeks to assess the level of understanding of research commercialization and entrepreneurship aspects by the faculty researchers nearly 10 years after Bayh-Dole Act using a survey of university faculty. The results show that there is indeed the desire to move research from universities to the marketplace through technology commercialization and entrepreneurship, but there is need for educational programs to enhance the current perceptions about the commercialization and entrepreneurship among faculty. We show that this need is independent of the demographic characteristics of faculty but influenced the university's policies covering intellectual property and commercialization.

Since the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, commercialization (e.g., patenting discoveries, licensing technologies, and developing startups) has become increasingly prominent at universities across the nation. These activities can be beneficial for universities as mechanisms to increase research dollars, unrestricted funds, student success, institutional prestige, and public benefit, while developing an innovation and entrepreneurship culture. However, although faculty members are a key source of human capital within the university commercialization process, studies of faculty members' experiences with university commercialization are scarce. To better understand these experiences, I conducted a multiple case study exploring engineering faculty members' commercialization experiences at three land-grant universities, using Activity Theory as an analytical framework. Each case consists of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 5-6 engineering faculty members, 1-2 university administrators, and a technology transfer officer, as well as university commercialization documentation (e.g., university commercialization policy documents and web resources). I analyzed the data using provisional coding (activity system elements, supports, challenges, and affect), inductive coding, and within and cross-case analysis techniques. The study's findings include characteristics of the university commercialization activity system, supports for and challenges to faculty engagement, and provisional recommendations to enhance the university commercialization work system. Key findings include faculty members' desire to make an impact with their work, lack of training and expertise relative to commercialization, conflicting attitudes towards commercialization from colleagues and administrations, and tensions about the place of commercialization within the university's mission. This study highlights an important and underrepresented voice in university commercialization research—"the voice of the individual faculty member. By understanding how faculty members experience university commercialization, university leaders are able to make well-informed decisions regarding the university's mission, culture, work structure, resource allocation, and incentive systems related to this increasingly-prominent faculty activity. Moreover, faculty members and industry collaborators interested in university commercialization can use the study's results to make decisions regarding if and how to best proceed with university commercialization activities. Accordingly, this work not only contributes to faculty work system design, but it also contributes a unique systems research approach to the university commercialization literature. / Ph. D.

Expectations regarding the contributions of academics to entrepreneurial activity in addition to their primary role of carrying out teaching and research have increased in recent years. Nevertheless, research on academic entrepreneurship has, to date, been carried out mainly in developed nations and there has been little emphasis on developing countries, particularly low income ones. Developing countries, when compared with developed nations, have been reported to face relatively high levels of resource scarcity that involve shortages of skills, finance, physical infrastructure, technology, and institutions needed for innovation and entrepreneurship. This gap in our knowledge leads to the main objective of this study, which is to investigate academic entrepreneurship in a resource constrained environment. Referring to the entrepreneurship and diversification literature, the current study argues that, as a strategy to extract value from a resource constrained environment, academic entrepreneurs may diversify their entrepreneurial engagements, which is named in this research as ‘plural activity’. In order to achieve the main objective, this thesis derives four specific objectives; namely, investigating the ‘plural activities’ of academic entrepreneurs, studying the motivations of academic entrepreneurs, examining the influence of multilevel causal factors on ‘plural activities’, and investigating the impacts of academic entrepreneurship on universities and wider economy. Sequential mixed methods were adopted in three stages; namely, an initial context specific data gathering stage, an on-line survey, and in-depth interviews. Initial context specific data were used to design two subsequent data collection phases. This approach was believed to improve the construct validity of the study. The main purpose of the on-line survey was to obtain a broad understanding of the entrepreneurial engagements of academics, while that of in-depth interviews was to obtain detailed context specific data, required to achieve research objectives. This sequential mixed method design of a survey being followed up by in-depth interviews was also considered to improve the internal validity of this research.The results suggested that entrepreneurial activity was a means of overcoming resource barriers in a resource constrained environment as opposed to resources are a means of becoming entrepreneurial in a resource rich environment. The majority of academic entrepreneurs had overcome resource and opportunity constraints by diversifying their entrepreneurial engagements. ‘Plural activity’ was found to generate synergies between multiple academic entrepreneurial activities. Diversifying into a greater number of different activities was found to generate more synergistic effects than diversifying into a limited number of similar activities. Nevertheless, there remained synergies between those who adopted different diversification strategies. Moreover, academic entrepreneurship was found to enable the overcoming of resource barriers to university teaching and research as well as deliver positive outcomes to universities and wider economy. Furthermore, it was evident that academics were initially motivated by ‘push’ motives and over time the influence of ‘push’ factors declined, while the impact of ‘pull’ motives increased. As a result of a lack of research capabilities of industry and funding for universities, there was a higher mutual interdependence between universities and industry. However, due to the unavailability of supportive mechanisms or formal institutional infrastructure to promote academic entrepreneurship, university-industry interactions were driven by individuals, and thus, were scattered and isolated. Policy implications and future research avenues were considered in conclusion.

Uppsatsens syfte är att undersöka vilka hinder och motsättningar som rådgivare och forskare upplever i forskningskommersialiseringsprocessen inom högskolenära inkubatorer. Studien bör ses som en förstudie för att i ett senare skede kunna skapa en effektiv innovationsprocessmodell för högskolenära inkubatorer. Uppsatsens frågeställningar har undersökts ur ett innovationstekniskt perspektiv med hjälp av teorier om bland annat inkubatorer, innovationsprocesser och akademiskt entreprenörskap. Resultatet visar att det finns ett antal kulturkrockar som medför risk för att rådgivare och forskare talar förbi varandra. Andra hinder och motsättningar i forskningskommersialiseringsprocessen är skillnader i språkbruk, forskarens multipla roller, uppfattningar om arbetstempo samt att matchningen mellan entreprenör och forskare är svårorganiserad och tidskrävande. / This essay seeks to examine which obstacles and oppositions business coaches and researchersexperience in the research commercialization process in university business incubators. This studyshould be seen as a pre-study with the intention of contributing to later on building a newinnovation process model for university business incubators. Essay questions have been examinedfrom the perspective of innovation technology and are linked to theories about incubators,innovation processes and academic entrepreneurship. The result is that there is a number of culturalclashes that brings along a risk for misunderstandings between business coaches and researchers.Other obstacles and oppositions in the research commercialization process is differences inlinguistic use, the multiple roles of the researcher, interpretation of working pace and also that thematching between researcher and entrepreneur is time-consuming and hard to organize.

Drawing upon the research on gender in science (especially gender and publication and patent productivity), social network studies, and social studies of interdisciplinary research and nanotechnology, this dissertation develops and tests a series of hypotheses to advance the understanding of the gender difference in patenting in the U.S. Ridgeways theory of gender frame (Ridgeway, 2009, 2007; Ridgeway&England, 2004) is very powerful in explaining gender inequity at both micro- and macro-levels, and thus constitutes the foundation of this study. After laying out the theoretical foundation, I set out to focus on collaboration as one of critical mechanisms accounting for the gender difference in patenting. While social network scholars maintain that social capital resides in network structure and claim different structures provide different benefits (Borgatti, Jones,&Everett, 1998), I conceive of diversity as the most important structural feature of collaboration networks to predict patenting performance, and accordingly develop the concept boundary-spanning collaboration to refer to collaboration networks containing relationships to diverse others. Then, I rely on social studies of gender, network, and desired outcomes as well as research on interdisciplinary fields in general and nanotechnology in particular to propose several hypotheses regarding how gender would differ on boundary-spanning collaboration and how the differences matter the gender gap in patenting in the context of nanotechnology. Two sets of analyses, performed on large-scale patent data and individual-level survey data, generate novel and important findings. These results enhance our understanding of the distinct context of nanotechnology, especially with regard to collaboration and gender representation, and the interrelationships of gender, boundary-spanning collaboration, and patenting involvement in this context. In brief, there are three major findings. First, while nanotechnology and patenting activities present new areas for gendered studies in science, the influential gender stereotypes always predict the detection of a gender gap. Second, collaboration networks, especially those featured with diversity, are relevant to the gender gap in patenting nanotechnology in a complicated way, but the operationalization of diversity is the key to comprehend the complexity. Third, the returns from collaborative relationships are generally gendered, but the gender gap in returns varies upon the context where a relationship takes place. Relating these findings to previous research, I highlight the theoretical and methodological contributions of this study, point out its limitations for future research development, and draw pertinent policy implications.