University Spinouts and Student Start-Ups: A Study in Heat Transfer and Rocket Science?

One of the current challenges for the developed countries is to establish and maintain a commercial and competitive advantage without the benefit of a low wage economy and in the face of increasingly stiff competition from such economies. Business analysts and regional development agencies find it easy to imagine the role of university staff and students in creating GDP from knowledge and technology but the challenge of entrepreneurship is often unimagined by faculty and students alike. How might the opportunities of new, knowledge-based business be brought more coherently to the attention of engineering faculty and students? Maybe one way is to begin the discussion by using engineering concepts familiar to the students and to develop an enterprise strand through the undergraduate curriculum. This paper provides some ideas of how the challenge might be accepted. Technology transfer, broadly understood to be the creation of new products, new processes and new companies from the research findings in universities, is well-established in principle but relatively few faculty are actively engaged in it. The demand is evident: few, if any, companies have the resources to carry out all the research and development necessary to generate the technology that they need for their products and processes. This paper considers how technology transfer might be characterised by an engineering approach and by analogy to well-established heat transfer processes. This engineering approach is developed further to consider the factors relevant to graduate entrepreneurship. The argument is put forward that the appropriate analogy can be drawn from combustion science and space exploration: the challenge is to identify barriers to 'ignition' and drivers of 'escape velocity'. The factors are reviewed and assessed in the light of feedback from students involved in business start ups. The conclusion is that not only might the engineering analogies be a useful way to introduce entrepreneurial issues to engineering students, but also that the analogies allow analysis that might indicate how improvements may be made to the support activity for student start-ups.Copyright © 2006 by ASME