In response to societal grand challenges, professors have unique opportunities to effect change, repurposing their expertise to deploy relevant, timely, practical, and research-backed knowledge for the betterment of communities. Drawing on scholarship on postcrisis organizing, entrepreneurial hustle, and social entrepreneurship, we provide a firsthand, real-time case description of a three-day "virtual idea blitz" organized in response to the COVID-19 crisis. The event was organized and executed in less than a week and ultimately involved 200 individuals, including entrepreneurs, coders, medical doctors, venture capitalists, industry professionals, students, and professors from around the world. By the end of the weekend, 21 ideas with corresponding pitches were developed in five thematic areas: health needs, education, small businesses, community, and purchasing. We describe how the community was rapidly rallied, and we discuss the key learning outcomes of this spontaneous entrepreneurial endeavor. We provide evidence from participants and mentors that showcases the value of the time-compressed virtual idea blitz in accelerating social entrepreneurial action. We offer practical guidance to academic, community, and professional institutions that would like to replicate or build upon our approach to stimulate the formation of community and to coordinate efforts to thwart the ongoing threat of COVID-19, as well as other societal challenges that might emerge in the future.

Technology transfer offices (TTOs) are of strategic importance to universities committed to the commercialization of academic knowledge. Within the university, TTOs' relationship with academics and management is single agent-multiple principal. When two principals exist in an agency relationship, conflicting expectations can naturally arise. We explore how TTOs build legitimacy by shaping identity with university academics and management. In undertaking this research we draw on 63 interviews with TTO executives across 22 universities in the Ireland, New Zealand and the United States. We find that TTOs use identity-conformance and identity-manipulation to shape a dual identity, one scientific and the other business, with academics and management respectively. We show how this combination of identity strategies is ineffective for legitimizing the TTO. We propose that TTOs' identity shaping strategies are incomplete and need to incorporate a wholly distinctive identity to complement and reinforce preliminary legitimacy claims made through conformance and manipulation. We discuss the potential implications of these findings for scholars, TTO executives and university management.

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While policy recognises the need to facilitate university-industry technology transfer (UITT), international studies indicate that the setup and effectiveness of the associated instruments is highly context-specific. We examine the reorientation of Irish universities in the direction of facilitating UITT, with a substantive focus on the role of Ireland's technology transfer offices. This paper also questions how academic research is changing in line with policy rhetoric. We find that Irish university research and the management of its output are changing in a manner that is not incompatible with UITT, although with significant resource and skills constraints. These findings hold important lessons for national economic and innovation systems of comparable size, with a development trajectory shaped by foreign direct investment. olicy makers in Ireland 1 have placed a marked emphasis on matters of innovation and view universities 2 as a key node in the Irish national innovation system (Forfás, 2004a). Yet with the exception of skill provision, the specific ways with which the capabilities of universities may be harnessed have entered the debate relatively recently (Forfás, 2007b).We examine the changing face of Irish universities, placing particular attention on the recent evolution of technology transfer offices (TTOs). Although the present work is an exploratory analysis of selected university-industry technology transfer (UITT) issues, it attempts to fill an important gap in the literature complementing the generalised observations of Cunningham and Harney (2006) with empirical insights from individual universities.Ireland, a small, open and rapidly growing economy, is a special case in that it possesses a technologically advanced economic system which, however, owes more to foreign direct investment than indigenous development. In that sense the broad innovation policy drive (and UITT) has an ex post 'afterthought' character, intended to sustain (rather than induce) the atypical Irish development model. Therefore, the insights provided here hold interest for the ex nihilo development of knowledgetransfer policies in similar environments, particularly in the new EU member states.We find that both the scale and direction of research in Irish universities are changing in a manner that is not incompatible with UITT, although with significant resource and skills constraints. PWill Geoghegan is at

This paper begins with a brief look at the literature on national innovation systems (NIS). Building on the NIS approach, we present a simple conceptual framework. National innovative competence is dependent on the presence of dynamic STI actors, operating within the confines of compatible institutions. We distinguish the roles played by different STI actors and argue that heterogeneous actors engage in innovation for different reasons. Collaborative innovation is not always a natural consequence of engagement in innovation but is characterised by a distinct set of considerations. The latter part of the paper is concerned with the application of this conceptual framework to the case of Ireland. We identify the institutions pertaining to Ireland’s current innovative performance. An outline of STI actors according to their role in the system is then presented. In turn we outline the various contributions of Irish STI actors and explore their motives for engaging in innovation and collaborative innovation.

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