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| 2. |
- Berg, Karin, 1985, et al.
(författare)
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Exploring industrial PhD students and perceptions of their impact on firm innovation
- 2020
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Ingår i: Bernhard, I. Gråsjö, U. & Karlsson, C. Diversity, Innovation and Clusters. Spatial Perspectives. - Cheltenham, UK : Edward Elgar Publishers. - 9781789902570
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This chapter explores industrial PhD students, including their activities and their perceptions of the impact of their studies and of their role in university–firm interaction on firm innovation. The limited number of previous studies of industrial PhD students mainly focus on broader issues related to these students’ educational experience and learning outcomes (Thune 2009), whereas studies of PhD students moving to industry generally focus not on their activities during education but rather on what happens after graduation (e.g., Cruz-Castro & Sanz-Menéndez 2005; Garcia-Quevedo et al. 2011; Roach & Sauermann 2010). Here, we consider a specific empirical phenomenon, namely, industrial PhD students during their education, when they are simultaneously involved in both the university and the firm. Because little research considers our phenomenon, we address two questions through detailed qualitative research, within the empirical context of collaborative research in the field of engineering in Sweden. Given the lack of previous research on this topic, our first question is, How to define an industrial PhD student? To answer this, we consider the conditions for education and employment, their specific activities, and the frequency of activities bridging the university and firm. Then we seek to explore their perceived contribution to firm innovation during their education as PhD students, so our second question is What is the perception of how their activities impact upon firm innovation? To conceptualize this, we first present an existing conceptual framework for academic engagement with industry, and further elaborating on underlying concepts in order to develop a detailed analysis of the the micro-level activities of these PhD students. Our results identify several activities of these industrial PhD students that merit analysis in future research, and specifically in relation to the development of firm capabilities for innovation.
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| 3. |
- Berg, Karin, 1985, et al.
(författare)
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Graduate Students as Boundary Spanners: How Academic Engagement can influence Firm Innovation
- 2020
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Ingår i: Academy of Management. Annual Meeting Proceedings. Volym 2020:1. - : Academy of Management. Annual Meeting Proceedings. - 2151-6561.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper contributes to literature on “academic engagement with industry”, by exploring graduate students as boundary spanners between firms and universities. As contrasted with studies of commercialization of scientific results through patents and start-up firms, literature on academic engagement focuses on how faculty members and students engage in knowledge-related interactions with external organizations. Extant literature has focused more on universities and less on firms. We conceptualize graduate students as holding a boundary spanning position between the firm and university, focusing empirically upon firm employed PhD students in engineering. More specifically, we investigate how their activities constitute a form of academic engagement, in order to further understand their influence on the firms’ absorptive capacity. We revise an existing conceptual framework and further develop the notion that there are two pathways – e.g. a direct and an indirect pathway – by which collaborative research may impact innovation outcomes within firms. When doing so, we specify how graduate student activities mainly support the development of firm capabilities for early stages in the innovation process, specifically recognizing the value and, to some extent, assimilating new external knowledge. We conclude with two propositions about how boundary spanner activities can be conceptualized as organizational routines underlying search capabilities
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| 4. |
- Broström, Anders, et al.
(författare)
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The knowledge economy, innovation and new challenges to universities: introduction to the special issue
- 2021
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Ingår i: Innovation: Organization and Management. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1447-9338 .- 2204-0226. ; 23:2, s. 145-162
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Universities face new challenges in the knowledge economy, due to two underlying transformations. One is that universities have increasingly developed from bodies of professorial self-governance bodies towards a status as ‘complete’ organisational actors, able to develop and deploy organisation-level strategies. A second is that by becoming key players in the knowledge economy and responding to stakeholder expectations, universities also have taken on new missions in addition to teaching and research. We propose that a series of new challenges arise from interrelations between universities’ internal organisational dynamics and changes in their external relationships. Moreover, we outline the contributions to this special issue, each of which address a specific question through their respective conceptual discussion and/or in-depth examination of these challenges. We conclude with recommendations for future research on the roles of universities in the knowledge economy and for innovation. Specifically, we propose that future research should simultaneously tackle vital issues about governance of universities and their activities, while also further developing extant empirical work on the microfoundations of academic knowledge production and career dynamics.
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| 5. |
- Brunnström, Linus, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Exploring the Role(s) of Researcher-Based Projects in Swedish University Incubators
- 2020
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Ingår i: Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings. - 2151-6561. ; 2020:1, s. 754-758
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- University incubators are an important part of how universities interact with society (Perkmann et al., 2013; Perkmann et al., 2019). In recent years, they have expanded their role. Beyond supporting academic entrepreneurship, they host and work with a variety of projects initiated by university employees other than researchers (Lindholm-Dahlstrand & Politis, 2013), students (Culkin, 2013), and even individuals without prior ties to the university. The effects of this diversity in terms of founder types have not yet been investigated in an incubator setting. In this paper, we investigate how founder, project and incubator characteristics relate to the likelihood of different types of projects to become knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial firms that have the potential to bring transforming innovations into the market (Malerba & McKelvey, 2018). Specifically, using a Swedish national dataset covering 37 incubators and a total of 3,383 projects over a ten-year period and applying competing risk models, we analyze the probability of different types of projects to either complete incubation or fail, i.e. exit from the incubator without having “graduated” into a viable firm. Little research exists on the composition of founder backgrounds in university incubators. Prior studies have compared matched samples of incubated and non-incubated firms (Lasrado et al., 2015), or assessed the performance of university incubators relative to that of private ones (Ratinho et al., 2010; Rosenwein, 2000). The roles of university ties (Lasrado et al., 2015; Rothaermel & Thursby, 2005) and networking within single incubators (McAdam & Marlow, 2008) have also been explored. Our paper adds to the literature by providing further insight into how university incubators function, and by analyzing the development of projects with diverse founder backgrounds across a large number of university incubators. We are particularly interested in differences between researchers versus other types of project founders and their projects’ respective likelihood of successfully completing incubation. We further analyze the role of incubator characteristics such as the breadth of admitted projects and incubator experience. We find that projects initiated by researchers have a lower hazard to complete incubation than other founders, but that they seem to create spillover effects on all other projects. Focusing on smaller numbers of project types in terms of founder backgrounds appears to be beneficial
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| 6. |
- Brunnström, Linus, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Exploring the roles of researcher-based projects in Swedish university incubators
- 2020
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Ingår i: Academy of Management. Annual Meeting Proceedings. - 2151-6561.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In recent years, university incubators have gone beyond directly supporting academic entrepreneurship by scientists to also support a variety of different activities related to academic engagement. One thing they do is to support a wide variety of projects, initiated by different types of potential founders. In this paper, we investigate which project and incubator characteristics explain the likelihood of different types of founders to turn their projects into knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial (KIE) firms. We address two gaps in the literature: how university incubators function and how the diverse backgrounds of different types of founders (researchers, students, other university employees, independent inventors and corporate spinoffs) may affect their likelihood of completing incubation and becoming a KIE firm. In line with previous research, we find that incubation projects initiated by researchers have a lower probability to complete incubation than the other types. More surprisingly, having research-initiated projects in an incubator seems to create spillover effects on all other projects, increasing their likelihood of survival. Moreover, the probability of projects successfully completing incubation increases if the university incubator has less breadth, as measured in admitting fewer types of project-founders, and if the incubator has more experience, as measured in age.
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| 7. |
- Brunnström, Linus, 1984, et al.
(författare)
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Managing the Process of Turning Researchers into Knowledge-Intensive Entrepreneurs
- 2021
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Ingår i: Academy of Management. Annual Meeting Proceedings. - 2151-6561.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Universities are increasingly engaged with a diverse set of activities, aimed at impacting the surrounding society, including starting firms based on research. But how do university incubators manage researchers? In this paper, the empirical setting is Sweden, where previous research suggests that the Swedish institutional context likely leads to a prioritization of commercialization by firm creation, rather than licensing or sales of IP. The reason is that the individual researcher owns all research outcomes in Sweden and not the university or state. Therefore, our paper explores how incubator and technology transfer office managers (hereafter innovation managers) reason when trying to manage researchers to reach the goal of creating knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial (KIE) firms. Two findings are of particular relevance for the literature. The first finding relates to how interviewed managers view researchers. Although expected from previous research, we provide more detailed understanding of why innovation managers perceive these researchers as being slow, less eager to start a business, and stuck on technical improvements, but also that their ideas are viewed as high-impact ones. Our second finding provides more detailed insights into how these managers developed a number of alternative paths to deal with researchers as potential entrepreneurs and still achieve commercialization. With or without the active participation of the researcher owning the ideas, we detail how these managers pursue two paths towards utilizing researchers’ ideas in order to impact society – namely actively seeking ways to start a KIE firm or actively seeking ways to transfer and distribute the ideas more widely.
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| 8. |
- Gifford, Ethan, et al.
(författare)
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The evolution of knowledge-intensive innovation ecosystems : co-evolving entrepreneurial activity and innovation policy in the West Swedish maritime system
- 2021
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Ingår i: Industry and Innovation. - Abingdon : Informa UK Limited. - 1366-2716 .- 1469-8390. ; 28:5, s. 651-676
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper contributes insights into the debate concerning the emergence of innovation ecosystems. More specifically, we propose a knowledge-intensive innovation ecosystem. Building on prior research on collective action, innovation governance, and knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship, we elaborate on existing theory by presenting a conceptual framework to articulate why ecosystems require the combination of top-down exploration of policy alternatives by policymakers, together with bottom-up knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial activity in order to progress towards sustainable development. Through our case study of the Maritime Cluster of West Sweden, we propose that sustained incentives for knowledge-intensive innovative entrepreneurship, along with more experimentation and new forms of collaboration by policymakers in the Maritime Cluster, are needed in order for progress towards innovation-led sustainable development to occur. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
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| 9. |
- Gifford, Ethan, et al.
(författare)
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Variety in founder experience and the performance of knowledge-intensive innovative firms
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of evolutionary economics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0936-9937 .- 1432-1386. ; 31:2, s. 677 - 713
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article contributes with an analysis of the specific linkages between knowledge, innovation and entrepreneurship for industrial dynamics, within the emerging literature upon knowledge-intensive innovative entrepreneurial (KIE) firms. We find a distinct variety in the usefulness of different types of founder experience (single or teams) in the performance of entrepreneurial firms. This variety affects selection in the economy, as measured by the performance of firms in a two-stage process – namely first by analyzing survival over time and then of high growth rates. We do so in order to consider averages/probabilities in the population using Cox regression as well as of the outliers, using quantile regression. We find that on one hand, founders having previously started firms or worked in the same industry are more likely to survive. On the other hand, very high-growth firms have founders who previously started firms or worked in universities. Combining different types of founder experience in KIE firms has a consistently positive relationship with performance both in terms of survival and of growth. Our interpretation is that the variety of founder experience affect selection processes and opportunity recognition in KIE firms and thereby fundamentally affect whether, and to what extent, entrepreneurial actions lead to industrial transformation.
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| 10. |
- Gustafsson, Erik, 1986, et al.
(författare)
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Artistic Education as a Potential Source of Knowledge-Intensive Innovative Entrepreneurship
- 2021
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Ingår i: 22nd CINet Conference - Organising innovation for a sustainable future, 13-15 September 2021.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper explores how artistic education may become a source of knowledge-intensive innovative entrepreneurship (KIE) in the fashion industry. Through an exploratory case study of the Swedish School of Textiles at the University of Borås, Sweden, we examine the varieties of knowledge developed by fashion design students at BA and MA levels, in order to analyse how they relate to artistic innovation and KIE. We systematically analyse programme syllabi and course curricula over time, contrasting these findings with interviews with alumni and academically responsible individuals at the higher education institution. Our findings show that the students develop artistic creativity by acquiring aesthetic knowledge, and that the knowledge development, as taught throughout the education, is aimed for artistic exploration. This exploration is further enhanced through scientific and technological knowledge, acquired through the tight links to research throughout the education. We argue that fashion design students thereby develop varieties of knowledge for artistic exploration and consequent artistic innovation. As such, they can play a crucial role, post-graduation, for the rise of KIE in the fashion industry, if complemented by varieties of knowledge related to market and business.
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