Volltext-Downloads (blau) und Frontdoor-Views (grau)
Schließen

How can Business Schools create and appropriate value in university-based technological innovation?

  • Discussion in the scholarly literature about partnerships between entrepreneurs and universities for the creation of technological spinouts, and for helping universities to extract more value from their technology-related intellectual property (IP), is lively. However, the literature exhibits a gap in understanding how business schools may participate in the process of technology commercialization by facilitating the creation of intellectual property rights. In this conceptual paper, we seek to fill this gap in three ways. First, we offer some novel conceptual insights by studying the partnership between technical universities and entrepreneurs using a multi-level approach, incorporating a phenomenological research method, through the lenses of several established theoretical perspectives from the domains of economics, social science, and management: the division of labor, motivation, the nature of the firm, organization, and IP. Second, we develop a working hypothesis focused on learning reinforcement through multiple organizational levels that predicts how business schools may play a prominent role in technology commercialization, together with the theoretical conditions under which they may do so. Third, we offer an IP management model under which business schools, as such, may create and appropriate financial value by generating innovation-related IP that may be transferred to enterprises. Our research reveals a misalignment between promising approaches to university-based technological innovation suggested by normative theory and typical approaches associated with extant practice; and it also highlights a strategic issue, which is that the performance of most universities in the domain of technology transfer is disappointing. We suggest a way to address this misalignment, and this strategic issue, which is through the establishment of what we label as "Technology Innovation Laboratories" in business schools-analogous to technical laboratories usually associated with technical universities-that could generate various types of product- or service-related IP. This type of intellectual property-typically different from invention IP, and which we label here as "business IP"-could be exchanged for equity in spinouts or royalties from licensing, similar to the manner in which the invention IP of technical universities is usually commercialized.

Export metadata

Additional Services

Search Google Scholar

Statistics

frontdoor_oas
Metadaten
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Author:Dmitry S. Smirnov, Kelvin WilloughbyORCiD
Chairs and Professorships:Chair of Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219877023500529
Parent Title (English):International Journal of innovation and technology management
ISSN:0219-8770
Year of Completion:2023
Page Number:58
Tag:Academic entrepreneurship; Business schools; IP management; Intellectual property; Technological innovation
Content Focus:Academic Audience
Rankings:AJG Ranking / 3
AJG Ranking / 1
VHB Ranking / C
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - CC BY-ND - Namensnennung - Keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 International