Gender and the commercialization of university science: academic founders of spinout companies

Abstract

There is a great deal of interest in Europe and the USA on the commercialization of university science, particularly the creation of spinout companies from the science base. Despite considerable research on academic entrepreneurship, female entrepreneurship in general, and the causes of under-representation of female scientists in academic institutions, there has been little research on the influence of gender on academic entrepreneurship.

The study researches female founders of UK university spinout companies using information from the Internet on company founders of spinout companies from 20 leading universities. The proportion of female founders at 12% is very low. The paper explores reasons for this low representation through follow-up postal interviews of the 21 female founders identified, and a male control sample. Under-representation of female academic staff in science research is the dominant but not the only factor to explain low entrepreneurial rates amongst female scientists.

Owing to the low number of women in senior research positions in many leading science departments, few women had the chances to lead a spinout. This is a critical factor as much impetus for commercialization was initially inspired by external interest rather than internal evaluation of a commercial opportunity. External interest tended to target senior academics, which proportionally are mostly male. A majority of the women surveyed tended to be part of entrepreneurial teams involving senior male colleagues.

As a whole both male and female science entrepreneurs displayed similar motivations to entrepreneurship, but collectively as scientists differed appreciably from non academic entrepreneurs. Women science entrepreneurs also faced some additional problems in areas such as the conflict between work and home life and networks.

Keywords:

• gender
• academic entrepreneurship
• female entrepreneurship
• innovation

Acknowledgements

The project was funded by the University of Stirling Faculty of Management Internal Research Fund. We are also grateful to the editor and the anonymous referees for their constructive suggestions.

Notes

Notes

1. For example, there was no reference to gender as being an important issue in recent studies by Klofsten and Jones Evans (2000) on European cross-national surveys on the entrepreneurial activities of science, engineering and medical academic staff; Whelan, Scott and O’Reilly (2001) on the counseling of academic entrepreneurs in Ireland; Franklin, Wright and Lockett (2001) on the activities of UK university spinout companies; Brooksbank and Thomas (2001) on commercialization activities in Welsh higher education institutions; Wright, Vohora and Lockett (2002) on commercialization in UK HEIs with comparative references to studies of US and Canadian HEIs; Goldfarb and Henrekson (2002), who examined the academic commercialization policies and compared the incentive structures of Sweden and the USA.

2. There is a varied literature on how university spinouts and academic entrepreneurs should be defined. Samson and Gurdon (1993) define an academic entrepreneur as ‘an academic whose primary occupation, prior to playing a role in a venture start-up, and possibly concurrent with that process, was that of a lecturer or researcher affiliated with a Higher Education Institute.’ We adopt in this study the definition of Brooksbank and Thomas (2001), where university spinouts are ‘companies founded/co-founded based on the results of research carried out by members of university staff, graduate students, undergraduate students and alumni’.

3. see http://gab.wigsat.org/unperfom.htm. (28th March 2004).

4. The UK Government has instigated a system of evaluating the quality of research in academic institutions known as the “Research Assessment Exercise” held every 5/6 years. The last exercise was in 2001. Each subject area within a university is ranked on the basis of research quality from 5∗ (nearly all research is of top international standing) to 1 (little research or research mostly of local significance). Core funding for research is allocated according to performance in these rankings, with most funding going to 5 and 5∗ Departments.