Doctoral Dissertation Research: When Two Worlds Collide: Examining the Influence of Academic Entrepreneurship on the Professional Obligations of Academics

University Of California-Riverside, Riverside CA

Investigators

Abstract

Academic entrepreneurship is the means by which faculty and students at universities engage in the commercialization of research and innovative ideas. By encouraging members of the academic community to participate in entrepreneurship, the university benefits in the forms of new technologies and inventions. Economic benefits are realized both for the institution and for society. While these immediate economic contributions are important, the university has an amplifying effect in education. By training students in innovation, the university can create a more innovative scientific workforce, both within and outside the walls of academe. However, this may come at a cost to the other roles that faculty play--in teaching, research, and service. Therefore, this doctoral dissertation research improvement project investigates the relationship between entrepreneurship and these other professional roles. The project examines three public universities with (respectively) low, medium, and high levels of entrepreneurship. These differing institutional contexts allows for an investigation of the role of institutional environment on entrepreneurship and education. By examining faculty perceptions of their professional commitment to their students, this project sheds light on how faculty entrepreneurial experience shapes their classroom instruction and their educational goals aimed at their students. Furthermore, the project addresses the importance of federal funding and federal programs in legitimizing and reinforcing faculty efforts to integrate their entrepreneurial experience into their teaching and mentoring of students. This project will inform the creation of better institutional policies and practices on academic entrepreneurship that best engage faculty and students in innovative activities without compromising the core education and research missions of institutions. This dissertation project follows a qualitative research design with a phenomenological approach to interviews. The project is conducted at a public university system in California. All participating campuses follow the same institutional policies but have different institutional environments and approaches to innovation. Participating campuses are characterized by their levels of engagement in entrepreneurship, which is measured by the number of spin-off firms and the total income generated by patenting and licensing. Faculty are recruited for the project because of (1) their participation in spin-off firms, (2) their conduct of research in a STEM field, and (3) their teaching of undergraduate and graduate students. Three methods are used to collect data. First, institutional policies on faculty participation in entrepreneurial activities and policies for tenure and promotion, as well as mission statements of the university and their entrepreneurship centers, are reviewed and examined to contextualize faculty perceptions and entrepreneurial motivations in their institutional settings. Second, interviews are conducted with faculty and students to explore their experiences in entrepreneurship and their entrepreneurial motivations. Third, interviews with directors and staff at the entrepreneurship centers in each university are conducted to contextualize and triangulate faculty interviews. Although faculty interviews constitute the primary data set, conventional content analysis is performed in all student, faculty, and staff interviews. In doing so, this project aims to connect faculty entrepreneurial experience with their instructional roles and shed light on how faculty entrepreneurial engagement shapes and influences an entrepreneurship education agenda of the university. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.