Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2009. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (Ph.D)--Strategy and Entrepreneurship, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Thursby, Marie C.; Committee Member: Barke, Richard; Committee Member: Rothaermel, Frank T.; Committee Member: Singhal, Vinod; Committee Member: Thursby, Jerry G.. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 228-241).

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study investigates the efforts of stakeholders in a regional innovation system (RIS) to reconstruct the system to enable the development of the nascent biotechnology industry in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Various institutions and organisations played a crucial role in effecting these changes. One of the most important changes involved legislation that altered the role that universities play in bridging the gap between research outputs and reaping commercial benefits from such outputs. Following the logic of the regional innovation system, the study focused on the institutional changes, the mechanisms employed to bridge this gap (from creating spin-off firms, and licensing technologies based on university research, to designing programmes to support the development of bio-entrepreneurs). For a comparative perspective from another region that arrived on the biotechnology scene relatively late, the study includes a section on university spin-offs in biotechnology from Hong Kong universities. Since all the efforts to effect the changes to the RIS that would enhance the growth of this promising industry are relatively new, the study faced the usual problems associated with pioneering developments, such as small samples, a complete lack of databases, etc. For this reason, the questionnaire survey and case study methods were used throughout the study. Starting from the general to the specific, the thesis is divided into four complementary parts. Part I comprises the general literature survey and rationale for the study, while Part II narrows the focus to the organisations and mechanisms that connect knowledge creation and knowledge exploitation in the regional context in the Western Cape, South Africa and Hong Kong, China. Part III evaluates early efforts at building a bridge from science to business in the form of bio-entrepreneurship programmes. Part IV takes a micro view, tracking the evolution of biotechnology spin-offs from Western Cape universities, and highlighting the role that institutional changes played in the genesis, growth and, unfortunately, demise of some biotechnology spin-offs. The last section concludes. Throughout the study a familiar refrain repeated itself with respect to the challenges faced by new spin-offs, namely the perennial culprits of a lack of appropriate skills, and funding. From our study, bearing in mind the small scale and the danger of generalisations, it would seem as if the reconstruction of the RIS and related changes in the national innovation system (NIS1) did not generate the results that the strategy hoped for (at least in the Western Cape, the focus of our study). A beam of light is the relative success achieved with the development and implementation of a bio-entrepreneurship training programme, which laid the foundation to build a more sustainable bridge between the science of biotechnology and the commercial world where the wealth creation opportunities reside.

The role of universities in supporting economic development has been explored in numerous studies emphasizing the mechanisms of technology transfer and knowl-edge spillover. However, in addition to these forms of intellectual capital, university scientists bring other resources into research collaboration and contribute to firm part-nerships in both direct and indirect ways. This thesis proposes the concept of resource spillover, which captures the various ways in which university scientists can benefit col-laborating firms. The study first analyzes firms, university scientists, and collaboration along with the concepts of ego, alter, and network ties in social capital theory; then it categorizes the resources possessed by university scientists into human capital, social capital, and positional capital, and tests the impact of each on the performance of a firm. The study finds that firms benefit from research collaboration in terms of both increased research capability and research output and improved public relations and research credibility. The study is carried out using a sample of new nanotechnology-based firms in the United States. As the U.S. government recognizes nanotechnology as providing scientific and technological opportunities with immense potential, this industry has be-come the recipient of significant federal R&D funding. In turn, because academic re-search has proven to be important to not only overall nanotechnology R&D but also in-dustrial R&D, it necessitates appropriate policy programs that support successful re-source spillover from academia and promote the development of industry.

This study traces how the National Curriculum Statement-Further Education and Training (NCS-FET) Life Sciences Policy is constructed and translated as it circulates across the Department of Education (DoE), schools and industry nodes. Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Latour, 2005) guides the theoretical framework and methodology of this study. ANT is a useful tool for showing the negotiations that characterise patterns of curriculum change in terms of how policy gets constructed, how practice gets performed, the skills, knowledge, attitudes and values (SKAV) constituted in practice, and whether there is an interface in terms of policy construction and SKAV constitution. From an ANT perspective curriculum policy change is a matter of practice co-performed by sociality and materiality, these being interwoven and entangled in practice. The trajectory of the NCS-FET Life Sciences Policy is traced during the practice of mediation of policy, implementation of policy and mediation of workplace learning. The topography of this study is underpinned by the transformatory agenda attached to curricula policy reform in South Africa. Agency has been granted by the democratically elected government to structures such as the DoE, schools and industry to promote human resource development and overcome the skills shortage via the NCS-FET Life Sciences Policy (DoE, 2003) and the National Biotechnology Strategy Policy (DST, 2001). There are divergences between these two documents as to the type of biotechnology that can be used as leverage for human resources development. The controversy lies in the notion of wanting to broaden access to biotechnology by having it included in the NCS-FET Life Sciences Policy, while wanting to promote third-generation biotechnology. Furthermore, contradictions are illuminated in the constitution of the NCS-FET Life Sciences Policy: it espouses constructivist principles and has a social transformative agenda, but its construction is guided by behaviourist and cognitivist principles. iv Employing the analytical tools offered by ANT (Latour, 1993, 2005; Callon, Law & Rip, 1986), the network tracing activity reveals that policy construction and SKAV development involve more than the action of a single human actor. This means that humans are not entirely in control of practice (Sorenson, 2007). Practice is performed by a series of shifting relations between elements of “sociality” and “materiality” (Mulchay, 2007). The network tracing activity elucidates that curriculum policy is an emergent effect of the interface, a dynamic point that arises from translations in the network. While there is an interface in respect of policy construction and SKAV constitution across the nodes of the study, the emergent effect of curriculum reform has pointed to the slippage between what was intended (via the policy as stated in the Government Gazette) and what was actually experienced in practice. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Edgewood, 2010.

My dissertation research focuses commercializing university related technology. My first essay investigates whether patents assigned to U.S. universities largely represent the totality of faculty inventions patented. In contrast to prior work that identified faculty patents by searching for patents assigned to the university, I find in a sample of patents with US faculty as inventors, 26% are assigned solely to firms rather than universities. This initially seems to conflict with US university employment policies and Bayh-Dole. I relate assignment to patent characteristics, university policy, inventor field and academic entrepreneurship. Patents assigned to firms (whether established or start-ups with inventor as principal) are less basic than those assigned to universities suggesting these patents result from faculty consulting. The second essay examines the growing phenomena of U.S. academic entrepreneurship. Building on prior work demonstrating the embryonic state of science and engineering research that is licensed through the university (Jensen & Thursby 2001), I extend this framework to university inventions commercialized by new technology-based firms (NTBFs). I posit that the presence of faculty inventor founders will be beneficial to the NTBF. This is tested with a uniquely constructed dataset representing a variety of university and industry settings. Results indicate firms with faculty founders have a higher likelihood to experience an IPO or become acquired than other similar new firms. Second, faculty members with highly cited publications have incrementally more impact on the likelihood of the firm having an IPO. Thus I discern that while faculty founders matter, 'star' scientists matter more. The third essay identifies significant variables in the observed career level patent assignment patterns of academic serial inventors. Existing life cycle models test the idea that consulting occurs later in the career span of academic scientists. I find that indeed the proxy for consulting (firm assignment of patents) is more likely the later the patent application is from the year of Phd for the faculty inventors. I found strong evidence that faculty performing industry consulting are more likely to continue consulting in subsequent work. However the use of rolling lag variables based on transition probability matrices increased the variance explained in the regression model by a factor of three indicating factors other than life cycle may be significant.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: leaf 237-244.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2005. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on June 10, 2006). Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Larry Baker. Includes bibliographical references (p. 219-224).