Are all academic entrepreneurs created alike? Evidence from Germany

Abstract

Using data from a large survey of German researchers in public science and based on a formal structure, this paper examines determinants of academic entrepreneurship. The key contribution is to discern factors driving research-driven entrepreneurship versus overall academic entrepreneurship. The extant literature has almost exclusively focused on the latter and implicitly assumed academic entrepreneurs to commercialize their research. Results show that, despite some plausible similarities in the determinants, there are significant differences. In particular, while both entrepreneurship categories benefit from greater patent applications, more time spent on consulting by the researcher and from participation in European conferences, research leaders and engineering science disciplines are more likely to lead to research-driven entrepreneurs. However, the positive influences of university employment (compared with being employed at a public research organization) on overall academic entrepreneurship fail to show up in research-driven entrepreneurship. One implication is that universities may be unduly patting themselves on the back – they might yield more entrepreneurs, but not necessarily research-driven entrepreneurs.

Keywords:

• entrepreneurship
• academic research
• patents
• publications
• Germany

JEL Classification :

• O3
• O5

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Editor (Dr Cristiano Antonelli) and two referees for comments. Goel thanks BOFIT and ZEW for hospitality during his stays that facilitated work on this project.

Notes

See Merton (1973) for an earlier significant work in this area.

Perhaps the closest study to the present work is Fini, Lacetera, and Shane (2010) for United States. However, besides the obvious focus on a different country, we are also able to examine the entrepreneurship distinction within the context of a structured model that incorporates a number of specific factors. Also see Krabel and Mueller (2009).

While there could be some collinearity between the variables in the categories considered, such issues do not appear to be significant, given the correlations in Table 1. Further, we perform various robustness checks below to test the validity of our results.

This study is based on a one time sample. Access to comparable data would enable one to test for reverse feedbacks from entrepreneurship to research structure. Further, an alternate theoretical foundation to the structure-conduct-performance paradigm could be to consider a two-stage scenario where the entrepreneurship is determined in the first stage and its type (academic versus non-academic) is determined in the second stage.

While the distinction between overall and research-driven entrepreneurship makes intuitive sense and is policy-relevant, it is quite difficult to tease out empirically. We are fortunate to have access to survey data that enable us to address some related issues. However, the underlying survey is more general and was not conducted for the sole purpose of gathering data for this study. Consequently, some interesting related issues cannot be addressed due to a lack of corresponding micro-level information. For example, information on congruent geographic attributes of the researchers and new enterprises could enable one to consider issues of spatial diffusion of knowledge (Anselin, Varga, and Acs 1997; Audretsch and Feldman 1996; Audretsch and Keilbach 2007; Audretsch and Lehmann 2005; Autant-Bernard, Mairesse, and Massard 2007; Capello 2002).

This excludes the so-called ‘universities of applied sciences’, whose major task is teaching and not research.

Ideally, a non-response analysis would require a control sample of non-respondents for whom information on gender, age, discipline and institution is needed. While the gender, discipline and institution could be gathered manually from the available sources, there is no information on the scientist's age (Wooldridge 2007). This makes it almost impossible to alternately fill entries for non-responses.

The questionnaire did not specify a certain patent office but instead referred to the concept of a patent family representing a single invention that could have however led to patent applications at several patent offices. Although there may be differences in the technological and economic importance of patent applications, for example between the European Patent Office and national patent offices, this research is primarily interested in whether scientists consider the commercialization of their research results and not in potential differences between the institutional loci of patent application.

The insignificant effect of tenure can be seen as consistent with the fact that job security that comes with tenure is unlikely to induce a researcher to engage in a relatively uncertain undertaking by becoming an entrepreneur.

Fini, Lacetera, and Shane (2010) on the other hand find that scientists in bio-science departments in the United States are more likely to be academic entrepreneurs. Besides using data for a different country, this study does not make the fine distinction between research-driven and general academic entrepreneurship considered by us. Note, however, that the effect of engineering sciences turns statistically insignificant when European conference participation is considered.

Given the appropriate data, one could examine additional spatial influences in terms of their impact on entrepreneurship (Autant-Bernard, Mairesse, and Massard 2007; Anselin, Varga, and Acs 1997).

The effect of engineering sciences, however, is sensitive to the consideration of European conference participation.

This finding should, however, be tempered by the fact that not all research is equally commercializable.

For instance, Fini, Lacetera, and Shane (2010), Jain, George, and Maltarich (2009), Link, Siegel, and Bozeman (2007) and Reynolds et al. (2004) are among the studies that focus on entrepreneurship in the United States.