Academic Entrepreneurship

Q: Can you become an entrepreneur if you are an academic ?

A: Yes

I have read some academic articles that focus on the role of academic brains in commercial enterprises. The level of academic varies starting from undergraduate to PhDs and professors. They gave many examples of different industries such as IT, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, etc. There were many questions raised by those researchers such as the skill of academic entrepreneurs, the motive behind joining the business world and my question would be how well did they do ? because being entrepreneur requires different skills and mental framework than being an academic. How did they manage to spin-off from the scientific world to entrepreneurial world?.

In this article I’m focusing on the skills part only, by showing that academics can posses high talents when it comes to problem solving and analyzing. Most of entrepreneurs in the street got the spirit but lack the analytical skills. Academics on the other hand, do not have that problem due to their experience in research.

Obviously Katalin Balázs the author of  “Academic Entrepreneurs and their Role in ‘Knowledge’ Transfer“ argues that the main skill they posses is the transfer of  knowledge to the small business they establish or participate in. The sample that she covered was Eastern and central Europe such as Hungary, so we can not be certain about the rest of academics in the world. However, we can learn something from it when it comes to understanding common skills that academics can offer for the business community.The author also  classified knowledge into subsets and skills :

“

. knowledge of knowledge
· knowledge of people (informal contacts)
· organisational knowledge
· market, partners, firms (who’s who)
· technical knowledge (history of particular pieces of equipment)

”

The above categories according to the author are the type of knowledge that can be transferred from entrepreneurial academics to the business. However , I’m not sure about the people and the market knowledge, because these information are acquired mostly by some one who is deep in the street-market and not just by being at the university only.

As a student at Bangor business school , I like the ‘entrepreneurship’ program that Bangor University offers for young students to prepare them take a future ‘entrepreneur’ job rather than prepare them mentally to pursue a job like what most universities do.

The entrepreneurial tool of the day is : Education.  Whether you get an academic degree, read books or attend seminars. They are all important for you if you seek success  and improvement in life and business. That does not mean that if you are an academic you are done. There are many types of skills that have to be learned that you do not find at universities. Life is a big school and we shall all continuously be life-long students.

Tags: academic entrepreneurship, Bangor university, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurial Tools, Entrepreneurship