Science First: Contributions of a University-Industry Toxic Substances Research and Teaching Program to Economic Development

Academic entrepreneurship (re)defined: significance and implications for the scholarship of higher education

“…Generally, the systemic change studied were anchored in broad shifts based on resource dependencies, increases in the academy's autonomy from state governance, and enhanced focus on the abilities and capacities of higher education systems to contribute to national and regional economic development. The research on American, Australian, and Canadian higher education contained within our final sample of articles primarily focused on institution-level change that included topics such as the institutionalization of technology transfer units and knowledge commercialization activities within college and universities (e.g., Dill 1995;Duke 2004;Harman and Harman 2004;Powers 2004) and university-industry collaboration (e.g., Anderson 2001;Bradshaw et al 2003;Fisher and Atkinson-Grosjean 2002;Harman 1999). Thus, we found academic entrepreneurship to be a phenomenon that has been understood at differing levels of analysis that are at least partially dependent of national and regional contexts.…”

“…Notably, there were six articles (Boardman and Ponomariov 2007;Bradshaw et al 2003;Louis et al 2007;Powers 2003;Tuuanainen 2005) that centered specifically on science and technology and in part conceptualized the findings using entrepreneurial terminology. This finding was not surprising to us considering science and technology have been largely understood to be the disciplinary fields most closely aligned with the knowledge economy (for a description of the knowledge economy see Powell and Snellman 2004).…”

Higher Education

“…In the case of the Journal of Higher Education (JHE), only one article in that five year span, "Commercializing Academic Research: Resource Effects on Performance of University Technology Transfer" by Powers (2003), focused entirely on an activity (technology transfer) that can be considered a typical unit of analysis within research policy studies. Other articles in JHE were marginally related to research policy by way of topics such as graduate students and the research function of universities Rhoads & Rhoades, 2005), faculty research performance (Fairweather, 2002;Marsh & Hattie, 2002), and the connection between science curriculum and economic development (Bradshaw et al, 2003).…”