Special Issue on University Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer: Introduction to the Special Issue on University Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer

Since the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, U.S. universities have increased their efforts in formal technology transfer and licensing, and in some cases, investments in new firms. During the last 20 years, the number of universities engaged in technology licensing has increased eightfold, to more than 200, and the volume of university patents has increased fourfold. Moreover, much of this activity involves efforts by “start-up” and small, young, technology-intensive firms to commercialize technologies developed by university faculty, staff, and students. For example, the Association of University Technology Managers reports that the share of member-university inventions licensed to new firms has increased every year since the group began to keep records in the early 1990s. Other anecdotal evidence suggests that investments by venture capital firms in technology firms founded by university students and faculty have grown significantly during this period. Despite the growth in both formal and informal entrepreneurial activities involving university inventions over the past 20 years, little scholarly research has explored this topic. Recently, scholars from several different academic disciplines and universities have begun to systematically study and document commercial technology transfer and university entrepreneurship. Nonetheless, the interdisciplinary nature of this inquiry means that a variety of analytic frameworks and methodologies have been employed, limiting the development of well-established empirical findings and resulting in a fragmented set of observations. To facilitate a cross-disciplinary discussion of findings on this topic, we organized a conference at the DuPree College of Management at the Georgia Institute of Technology in December 2000 to discuss a set of papers about university entrepreneurship and technology transfer. The conference brought together researchers from a range of backgrounds, including students of strategic management and organization theory, and economists, historians, and sociologists of technical change. The papers employed a variety of methodologies, including qualitative, interview-based techniques, regression analyses of survey data, and sophisticated econometric analyses of archival data. The empirical analyses employed different units of analysis, such as the individual invention, the university, firms, or industries, in examining university technology transfer and entrepreneurship. We hope that the resulting collection of papers will provide a foundation for the accumulation of knowledge on this topic across a variety of disciplines and perspectives.