Kathleen R Allen

The unpredictability of uncertainty is particularly troublesome for engineering and science-based companies because they are accustomed to calculating risk and acting on those calculations with a high degree of confidence. What this means for business leaders today is that they must immediately take steps to make their organizations more flexible and resilient to the shockwaves of uncertainty, and to do that requires a new way of thinking.

Economic growth happens when innovation meets entrepreneurship. With the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, universities were permitted to commercialize their federally funded research. But it wasn’t until the mid-1990's that universities began in earnest to develop programs to facilitate commercialization and technology entrepreneurship. Despite this effort, today we still have not figured out how to best move more of our research into the market to benefit society. In fact, business struggles with many of the same issues as universities do. What have we learned? In this paper, I review the literature within the four domains of university entrepreneurship—1) the entrepreneurial research university; 2) new firm creation, 3) productivity of technology transfer offices (TTOs), and 4) the environmental context in which these activities occur—and then offer an argument for a more integrated approach to understanding how universities and their researchers deal with the Third Mission: university entrepreneurship.