Search results

Despite a recent increase in government funded intervention schemes a number of attitudinal and operational barriers continue to constrain university technology transfer in the UK (Wright, Birley, & Mosey, 2004). A recent report commissioned by the UK government (Lambert, 2003) asserts that the inability of some universities to develop links with industry is a key barrier to the commercialisation of research. Moreover it is argued that academics focus exclusively upon their research due to the explicit link to career progression (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). As a result academics, in the main, remain reluctant to explore the potential for commercialising their research. This paper considers a novel fellowship scheme aiming to overcome these barriers by retraining academics and encouraging them to interact with their peers and with industry practitioners to help commercialise research within their schools.

This study aims to understand how small‐ to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) can build a dynamic capability for new‐to‐market product development.

Five innovative and ambitious case firms were selected and studied longitudinally over the course of five years.

Within this group distinct development processes are identified that enable them to satisfy the unmet needs of new customers using their current technologies. However to sustain this activity managers need to empower cross‐functional teams to evaluate new technologies with an ever‐increasing number of pioneering partners. An ideal sequence is proposed for them to achieve this by systematising learning between projects and thereby reconfiguring their development processes to meet the changing needs of the market.

This method appears most suited to SMEs able to develop new‐to‐market products in conjunction with technologically discerning customers and suppliers. As such it may be less applicable outside the observed business‐to‐business markets.

The five cases studied aptly illustrate the interplay of certain paths, positions and processes in terms of how they relate to new‐to‐market product development performance. The implication for researchers and managers is that consideration of all of these factors is necessary.

Reports the product innovation activities of 30 British manufacturing SMEs, all with aggressive growth ambitions. Shows that ten of these companies meet their aims by repeatedly introducing innovative new products that open up new market niches, which they successfully exploit. This is seen to contrast with the remaining, larger group that performs less well by introducing incremental improvement products into their current markets only. A longitudinal study identifies managerial approaches typical to the more successful group. These include a multi‐functional approach to decision making and the use of market and competitor analysis in strategic product planning. This is supported by effective cross company communication of decisions and plans. Concludes that this combination of approaches offers ambitious small firms a potentially powerful competitive advantage over their larger rivals.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the Medici Fellowship Scheme addressed attitudinal and resource barriers to the commercialisation of knowledge within five research‐intensive universities. The following research questions were explored: Did the Medici fellows change the attitudes of academic network members in host departments towards the commercialisation of research? Did the Medici Fellowship Scheme encourage fellows to accumulate human and social capital? Did the Medici Fellowship Scheme encourage fellows to leverage their academic and practitioner networks?

The scheme was implemented in Biomedical departments across five universities located in the Midlands in England. Six months after the completion of the scheme information was consistently gathered from six Medici fellows, six technology transfer officers (TTOs) and six senior academics. Face‐to‐face interviews were conducted. Information was gathered through structured and semi‐structured open‐ended questions.

Fellows who accumulated human and social capital were able to act as agents of attitudinal change in their host departments. The fellows did not markedly change the culture towards commercialization, but they addressed several structural holes by building network bridges with actors positioned in practitioner networks. They created new weak ties with external actors who provided early stage funding, market and legal information and potential customers. Fellows also strengthened existing ties within academic networks both inter and intra university. The career destinations of the fellows after the scheme helped sustain bridging behaviour by providing points of contact for their peers and/or by demonstrating the viability of alternative sources of funding and prestige for academics.

Despite a widely perceived successful scheme, structural holes were still apparent in the monitored departments. Additional bridges need to be built between academic networks and actors, such as surrogate entrepreneurs and private equity financiers, to ensure the sustained development of new ventures.

Guided by insights from human and social capital theory and network theory the outcomes associated with a novel structured training initiative were monitored. Case study evidence was gathered from three types of university stakeholders (i.e. Medici fellows, TTOs and senior academics) involved in the commercialisation process.

A broad range of policy evaluations below is begun in Chapter 2 by Kate Johnston, Colette Henry and Simon Gillespie in their evaluation entitled ‘Encouraging Research and Development in Ireland's Biotechnology Enterprises’. This investigation critically evaluates Irish government policy towards biotechnology development over a preceding 10-year period. In Chapter 3, Anthony Ward, Sarah Cooper, Frank Cave and William Lucas examine ‘The Effect of Industrial Experience on Entrepreneurial Intent and Self-Efficacy in UK Engineering Undergraduates’ in a large-scale study that generally produces satisfactory results in terms of raising the profile of entrepreneurship among undergraduates. Deirdre Hunt, in Chapter 4, again focuses on the evolution of strategy in Ireland, this time towards the more general topic of new firm formation with a personal contribution entitled ‘Now You See Them — Now You Don’t: Paradoxes in Enterprise Development Strategy: The Case of the Disappearing Academic Start-Ups’.

The objective of this study is to explore the types of innovation that are predominant in UK SMEs, whether they are predominantly radical or incremental, and to investigate the impact of these innovations on performance.

A web‐based survey instrument was used to administer survey questionnaires to a sample of UK SMEs in manufacturing, engineering, electronics, information technology and telecommunications industries. The response rate was 13.8 percent. Relevant statistical analytical techniques including regression for analysis was then used.

It is found that the SMEs tend to focus more on incremental than radical innovations and that this focus is related to growth in sales turnover.

It is not such a bad idea for SMEs, particularly those operating in high technological industries, to focus on incremental innovations as these are actually related positively to sales turnover growth.

An investigation of the types of innovation that SMEs pursue is pioneering in the field as previous studies of this type have been based on large firms. The contention that the raison d'etre of SMEs is to develop radical innovations is not supported empirically, at least for the sample of SMEs. In addition, it is found that the age of an SME is not related to its focus on either incremental or radical innovation. These are the contributions of this paper.

In this paper, we contribute to the understanding of how entrepreneurs can deploy their values to enable joint action of heterogeneous stakeholders. Such an understanding forms a critical endeavor to tackle grand challenges adequately. Building on sensegiving research, we conducted a single-case study of an entrepreneurial initiative that tackles gender inequality in Lebanon which has been successful in mobilizing heterogeneous stakeholders who ordinarily would not collaborate with each other. We find that the values of the founders were pivotal for the initiative’s success as those values activated latent values of stakeholders through processes of contextualization and enactment. We subsume these processes under the label value-driven sensegiving. As a result of value-driven sensegiving, heterogeneous stakeholders could make sense of the founders’ aspirational vision and the role they could play in it, which paved ways for tackling grand challenges collaboratively. Our study provides insights into the centrality of values for mobilizing heterogeneous stakeholders across boundaries. Therefore, it contributes to the body of work on sensegiving, societal grand challenges, and new forms of organizing.

To explain how cumulative efforts contribute to learning and literacy development.

A representation of how efforts lead to lasting growth is discussed through a variety of historical and current perspectives across content disciplines. This chapter includes depictions of how positive experiences can promote further success and recognizing one’s cumulative efforts and the effects from those are fundamental to educational attainment.

The value one places on tasks such as reading or writing is often aligned to the frequency with which those events occur. Students view their time and effort as capital; they are students’ most valued possessions, and how they allocate these commodities is a choice.

For students to become avid readers and writers, we must utilize a host of strategies to impress the notion that these activities are worth their attention, time, and investment.