Research

To meet the challenges of today’s complex and global economy, the new entrepreneur needs to fuse the traditional strategies for successful business formation with a new set of business models and techniques. Through fellowships, workshops, symposia, conferences, and publications, we work with the world–class research faculty at the School of Management and across the BU campus to better understand how new ideas are protected and valued, how innovations are adopted, and how new technologies can effectively improve our lives.

ITEC Research Papers

Important Things for Entrepreneurs to Know about Angel Investors

Inside or outside the IP system? Business creation in academia.

Research and public policy on academic entrepreneurship are largely based on the assumption that faculty members start businesses to commercialize inventions that have been disclosed to university administrators and have been patented. In this paper, we analyze a sample of 11,572 professors and find that much academic entrepreneurship occurs outside the university intellectual property system. Specifically, about 2/3 of businesses started by academics are not based on disclosed and patented inventions. Moreover, we show that individual characteristics, departmental and organizational affiliations, and time allocation of academics that have started business outside the IP system are different from those of academics that have started businesses to exploit disclosed and patented inventions. We discuss the implications for research on and the practice of academic entrepreneurship.

How are U.S. Technology Transfer Offices Tasked and Motivated— Is It All About the Money?

We conducted a survey of directors of offices of technology transfer (TTOs) at U.S. academic institutions to determine how they are organized, tasked, financed, and motivated. We found some interesting quantitative data that have not been reported previously: (1) academic institutions spend on average 0.6% of their research budgets on transferring the technology resulting from their research programs, split 45% on patent protection and 55% on operating costs; and (2) over half the technology transfer programs bring in less money than the costs of operating the program, and only 16% are self-sustaining, bringing in enough income that, after distributions to inventors and for research, there are sufficient funds to cover the operating costs of the program. This leads to the surprising conclusion that the Bayh-Dole Act has been an unfunded mandate on academic institutions, and that academic institutions need to invest in their technology transfer operations in order to bring the benefits of their research to society.