Thesis (M.S. in Management of Technology)--Vanderbilt University, Aug. 2004. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

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.

The purpose of this study was to examine the differences between the traditional global rating scale and a new behavioral rating scale in a university-based assessment center. It was hypothesized that personality factors, as measured by the 16PF and associated with the global ratings of performance would differ from those associated with the behavioral ratings of performance. It was further hypothesized that the associated personality factors would also differ for males and females. These hypotheses were ^confirmed. Pearson correlations were computed for ratings of males, females, and all subjects combined on both global and behavioral rating scales.

The Muscatine Pediatric Dentistry Clinic (MPDC) at the Muscatine Center for Social Action (MCSA) was established January 4th, 2005. It is a partnership between the MCSA and The University of Iowa's Department of Pediatric Dentistry. MPDC operates Tuesdays (care provided by senior dental students) and Thursdays (care provided by pediatric dentistry residents). Students and residents are supervised by a pediatric dentistry faculty member. MPDC's mission is to provide dental care to low income children residing in Muscatine and Louisa counties, in Iowa. Care includes diagnostic, preventive, restorative, and emergency services. MPDC targets a population that has been traditionally underserved by local dentists including Medicaid-enrolled children and low income children without dental insurance. MPDC offers dental students the opportunity to gain experience treating children with the ultimate goal of increasing the number of practicing general dentists who serve pediatric populations. MPDC completed 6 years of operation on January 4th, 2010. The main goals of this study were to describe patient characteristics, clinical activities and parental satisfaction at the Muscatine clinic and to compare characteristics of the Muscatine clinic to those of the University of Iowa's pediatric dentistry clinic at the College of Dentistry. Clinical activities and patient profile variables for MPDC were reported for the entire fiscal year 2009-10 year. Variables include patient age, gender, type of insurance, number of dental procedures completed, type of treatment received, and number of visits per patient. A satisfaction survey was given to the parent of each patient presenting to the MPDC clinic between November 16th, 2009 and January 17th, 2010. Two broad research questions were addressed in this study: 1) Are parents satisfied with MPDC and the treatment provided to their children? 2) Are there are differences in the population served and treatment provided at the Muscatine clinic and the University of Iowa pediatric dentistry clinic at the College of Dentistry? The results of this study provide information that contributes to a fuller understanding about the population served by MPDC, the treatment received, and parental satisfaction with the clinic. It also compares characteristics of the Muscatine clinic to the University of Iowa's pediatric dentistry clinic at the College of Dentistry. The results of this study may help guide MPDC staff and the University of Iowa's Department of Pediatric Dentistry in future decision-making regarding clinic activities and dental school curriculum.

M. Tech. Organisational Leadership / Over the past few decades, increasing attention has been paid to the contribution of Universities of Technology towards advancing the frontiers of science and technology. However, such research is descriptive and lacks a theoretical framework. Relying on the resource-based theory and incubation models, the present research is concerned with proposing a theoretical framework for the enabling factors that influence the graduation of new technology-based firms that result from the commercialisation of research and technology through to becoming established businesses from university technology business incubators. This framework is being proposed with two major objectives in mind. The first is to identify the main enabling factors that influence the graduation of new technology-based firms within university technology business incubators, which may provide a base for university stakeholders to design an appropriate incubation programme aimed at timely and successful graduation of new technology-based firms. The second is to link the development of business ideas to enabling factors that influence their progression into graduate businesses, which may provide a better understanding of how university incubation aspects work, providing theoretical insights into the incubation process of new technology-based firms. In the theoretical framework, a number of enabling factors were identified as components of the incubation process, namely stringent selection and admission criteria, administrative and legal policies, access to financial resources, access to university entrepreneurial network/mediation, and access to organisational resources and business support services. The most significant finding of the research is that there are a number of enabling factors that influence the graduation of new technology-based firms within university technology business incubators, the most significant of which are stringent selection and admission criteria, the business support services, financial resources, university entrepreneurial network/ mediation and organisational resources. Each of these factors is grouped into three stages: the pre incubation stage, the incubation stage and the graduation stage.

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 (MTech (Business Administration))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2015. / Universities have long been recognised as sources of knowledge creation, innovation and technological advancements. Interest in academic entrepreneurship and the establishment of university spin-off companies has grown in South Africa over the past 10 years. South Africa’s national research and development strategy argues that economic growth and wealth generation are founded on innovation. The area of university entrepreneurial behaviour and technology commercialisation has attracted much research attention in recent years especially as more innovative solutions are sought for the world’s ever growing socioeconomic challenges. In view of this, the South African government has made considerable and various efforts to promote the creation and commercialisation of research output in the university context. Against the aforementioned, this study seeks to understand the position of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) as a university of technology in terms of commercialisation and technology creation since the 2005 merger. More specifically, the study seeks to understand the dynamics surrounding the creation and transfer of technology in South Africa, using CPUT as a case study.

abstract: There is a documented gap between research-based recommendations produced by university-based scholars in the field of education in the United States and the evidence that U.S. politicians' use when deciding which educational policies to implement or amend. This is a problem because university-based education scholars produce vast quantities of research each year, some of which could, and more importantly should, be useful to politicians in their decision-making processes and yet, politicians continue to make policy decisions about education without the benefit of much of the knowledge that has been gained through scholarly research. I refer to the small fraction of university-based education scholars who are demonstrably successful at getting scholarly research into the hands of politicians to be used for decision-making purposes as "university-based bipartisan scholarship brokers". They are distinct from other university-based education scholars in that they engage with politicians from both political parties around research and, as such, are able to use scholarly research to influence the education policymaking process. The problem that this dissertation addresses is the lack of use, by U.S. politicians, of scholarly research produced by United States university-based education scholars as input in education policy decisions. The way in which this problem is explored is through studying university-based bipartisan scholarship brokers. I focused on three areas for exploration: the methods university-based bipartisan scholarship brokers use to successfully get U.S. politicians to consider scholarly research as an input in their decision-making processes around education policy, how these scholars are different than the majority of university-based education policy scholars, and how they conceive of the education policy-setting agenda. What I uncovered in this dissertation is that university-based bipartisan scholarship brokers are a complete sub-group of university-based education scholars. They work above the rigorous promotion and tenure requirements of their home universities in order to use scholarly research to help serve the research needs of politicians. Their engagement is distinct among university-based education scholars and through this dissertation their perspective is presented in participants' own authentic language. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2013

The purpose of this study was to explore the transition experience of three individuals with intellectual disabilities, members of their family, their former transition program coordinator, and members of their support network including current employers or support service providers. This qualitative study used Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological model and Kohler’s (1996) Taxonomy for Transition to frame three case studies designed to capture the transition experience of young adults with disabilities who exited a university-based, school district funded, transition program. Using Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological perspective, which focused on a behavior or interaction of people across multiple environments, the aim was to interview individuals from the micro, meso, and exo levels within the individuals’ systems of support. The transition experience took place outside the bounds of a school and involved a broad network of support that ranged from close nuclear ties between the individual with disabilities and their family members to broader social ties between the individual with disabilities and their employer or support service provider. A total of nineteen interviews were conducted for this study. Each interview lasted between twenty to ninety minutes in length. Individuals were asked to participate in an interview to respond to pre-scripted, open-ended questions based around Kohler’s (1996) five domains of transition within the Transition Taxonomy. The nineteen interviews were transcribed, coded and organized around themes linked to the five domains of transition: student-focused planning, student development, program structure, family involvement and interagency collaboration. In addition to the five domains of transition, five additional themes were common across members of the three case studies. These additional themes included: • It Takes a Strong Interconnected Network • Recognizing Narrative is Critical • Inclusion is Important to the Community • A Knowledgeable Transition Coordinator is Integral • Life is Comprised of a Series of Transitions The transition from high school to post-school life includes a focus on employment and independent living. That transition is unique and personal, but regardless of the person, a network of support is required to ensure success. The three young adults who were interviewed and around whom the case studies were developed exemplify the importance of maintaining a strong support network as you plan for and implement the transition from school to post-secondary life. Each young adult has utilized ties with family and members of their community to secure paid employment, maintain their social circles, and expand their level of independence.

In the knowledge world into which mankind has progressed, universities are engines of economic growth. Their role has changed from producers of labour force to equal contributors - along with government and industry- in regional and national economic and social growth and development. Universities that will survive and succeed in this new climate must embrace entrepreneurship - become entrepreneurially oriented. As in any other organisation corporate entrepreneurship processes explain how entrepreneurship is implemented and diffused throughout a university, and its members must perceive the internal organisational culture as innovation supporting for entrepreneurship to flourish. Hence, the importance of studying internal environmental conditions that influence / enable corporate entrepreneurship. This study investigated NMMU’s entrepreneurial orientation by first determining what an entrepreneurial university is and its key attributes. Next it identified the key structural factors influencing university entrepreneurship and enquired how these structural factors can be influenced to enhance entrepreneurship at NMMU. To this end, survey method was used to sample perception of the university middle managers. The study first determined the level of entrepreneurship in NMMU by measuring its entrepreneurial intensity and then attempted to locate its position on the entrepreneurial grid. Next the level of the university’s internal environmental support for entrepreneurship was determined. The university’s culture was found to be the key factor influencing entrepreneurship with time availability and work discretion as key internal factors through which NMMU’s entrepreneurial culture could be improved. Proactivity and frequency dimensions of entrepreneurship were found to lead to significant improvement in the university’s entrepreneurial output and based on the outcome of the study; suggestions were made on ways of incorporating findings to better improve entrepreneurial orientation.