46 Academy of Management Perspectives February An Auto ......An Auto-Ethnographic Perspective on Academic Entrepreneurship: Implications for Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities

An Auto-Ethnographic Perspective on AcademicEntrepreneurship: Implications for Research in theSocial Sciences and Humanitiesby Morten Pilegaard, Peter W. Moroz, and Helle Neergaard

Executive OverviewThis paper employs a qualitative method to analyze a successful spin-off from a university’s humanitiesdepartment. We offer insight into (a) how sociospatial contexts may be structured to better evaluate theentrepreneurial facilitation process and (b) why academic entrepreneurship in the social sciences andhumanities may differ from that in the hard sciences. Our findings illustrate the importance of bridginginnovation using twin skills to balance research and commercial goals, and the need for codifyingknowledge capacities and creating new or changing existing institutional structures to legitimize andfacilitate entrepreneurial activity. The research also demonstrates the great value of auto-ethnographictechniques to bring fresh insight to the study of entrepreneurship. Directions for future research are offered.

In recent years, the upsurge of entrepreneurialactivity within the natural sciences1 has put thehumanities and the social sciences on the defen-

sive across several fronts, including educationalrelevance, value for money, and impact on theeconomy (Kayrooz, Kinnear, & Preston, 2001;Wallerstein, 1996). Ultimately, the future of theseacademic disciplines depends, in part, on the ex-tent to which they are seen as proactive contrib-utors to technology development and economicgrowth. One pathway to economic growth can bevia academic entrepreneurship.2 However, signif-

icant subjective and objective barriers remain andneed to be addressed to bring social sciences andhumanities out of their current defensive position.For academic entrepreneurship to become morewidespread, particularly within the humanitiesand social sciences, we need to better understand(a) the change dynamics in university institutionsand (b) the specific processes used to facilitateentrepreneurial outcomes across a wide range ofuniversity contexts. In other words, we must refo-cus our research efforts on how academic entre-preneurship takes place by understanding therelationship between process and the heteroge-neous sociospatial environments where entre-preneurship happens. In other words, we needto understand the persons involved in academicentrepreneurship, their interaction with theirenvironment, and how both persons and envi-ronment change over time (Gartner, 1985).

We need new and innovative research methods

1 Over the past decade politicians, funding agencies, and researchcouncils have raised the themes that the function of universities is toprovide direct in-out benefits for society’s economic prosperity, that thereis a close relationship between university applied research and economicprosperity through the medium of scientific and technical innovation, andthat prosperity correlates closely with university research in science andtechnology. Universities have responded to this call for capitalizing knowl-edge by spinning out companies, mainly at the intersection of industry andthat part of academia that is concerned with natural and technical sciences.

2 We define academic entrepreneurship as the involvement of aca-demic scientists and organizations in commercially relevant activities indifferent forms, including industry-university collaborations, university-based venture funds, university-based incubator firms, startups by academ-

ics, and double appointments of faculty members in firms and academicdepartments.

* Morten Pilegaard ([email protected]) is a Professor at Aarhus School of Business, Aarhus University, Denmark.Peter W. Moroz ([email protected]) is a Doctoral Candidate at the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship.Helle Neergaard ([email protected]) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management, Aarhus School of Business, Aarhus University,Denmark.

46 FebruaryAcademy of Management Perspectives

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that can be used to explore the social and struc-tural perspectives that are keenly important tostudying how change, specifically the types ofchange associated with the process of academicentrepreneurship, may be better understood andsystematically facilitated. Given the diverse arrayof institutional structures that exist and the manydifferences among university environments, re-searchers must look for broader patterns in thespecific contexts where entrepreneurship takesplace in order to enhance our understanding ofgeneral theory—the root of all best practice. Thisrequires a return to excellence in routine, cumu-lative field work; reliance on frameworks deducedfrom observation; and less emphasis on complexstatistical models, especially for understanding thecomplexities of human interaction (involved inthe process of entrepreneurship). A helpful way tomake meaning of these complex human interac-tions is to create an epistemology of process thatincludes the use of narrative theory3 (Langley,1999; Van de Ven & Engleman, 2004).

Facilitating innovative entrepreneurial ven-tures is a challenging process in any environment(Shane, 2007). Achieving success is even moredaunting in the context of university technologytransfer. This is particularly true about entrepre-neurial ventures spun out from humanities andsocial science schools. The focus of this paper,therefore, is to understand this process better. Wedo so by examining a case in which an academicentrepreneur in the humanities field succeededwith the challenging process of commercializinghis research.4 Our aim is to understand (a) how adefined sociospatial context may shape the entre-preneurial process and (b) what characterizes thisprocess within a context specific to the socialsciences and humanities. To answer these ques-tions, we structurally break down and examine arich narrative data set using a novel analyticalmethod. We identify factors that convey how the

new venture was created within the environmentstudied, and then generalize these findings forthose who seek to identify a systematic approachto commercialization in this area.5

This study makes three contributions. First,research into how university entrepreneurshipmay be facilitated in areas other than the hardsciences is scarce (Harmon, 2005; Nelson, 2005;Shane, 2002). Assessing the potential approachesfor developing commercial activities around re-search in academic fields other than the hardsciences may have considerable value. Second, weprovide insight into social interaction (the milieuof the “where”) in the entrepreneurial processusing social constructionist views—that is, weadopt an approach that examines the entire eventfrom a sense-making perspective to better under-stand “how it happened” (Giddens, 1994; O’Shea,Thomas, Arnaud, & Frank, 2005; Rothaermel,Agung, & Jiang, 2007; Sarason, Tom, & Jesse,2006). We thus argue the merits of a qualitativeapproach to understanding university entrepre-neurship and test a novel diagnostic tool that mayhelp examine the differences across types of uni-versities that engage in entrepreneurial activities(Shane, 2002). Last, this research offers uniqueinsight into the process of new venture creationfrom a very specialized and not well-understoodarea of study. In doing so, we expect to contrib-ute to theory, practice, and policy on academicentrepreneurship, and provide empirical evi-dence that may inform the field of entrepre-neurship in general.

The paper is structured as follows. We firstexplore academic entrepreneurship and compareand contrast environments in the social and hardsciences to frame the study context. Next, wenarrow the domain of academic entrepreneurshipto our main case, a university spin-off at a largeDanish university. The paper goes on to discussprocess theory and introduces a diagnostic tool forempirically examining how community context(here the university setting) influences entrepre-neurial process (Hindle, 2010b), using narrative

3 Narrative theory is based on the concept that people are essentiallystorytellers and that individuals approach their social world in a narrativemode and make decisions and act within this narrative framework. Thenarrative is therefore a form of “meaning making.”

4 Humanities research in the present case is conducted within theinstitutional context of a large department of language and business com-munication, which is part of a mono-faculty business school within thesecond-largest Danish university.

5 We use an auto-ethnographic approach in which one of the authorsis the entrepreneur who lived the experience and the co-authors providedthe conceptual framework and methods and analyzed the data.

2010 47Pilegaard, Moroz, and Neergaard

data on a specific, successful entrepreneurial pro-cess. The generic model permits us to develop acase-specific process model of the entrepreneurialevent on which we focus. We conclude with adiscussion of our findings, their implications, andhow this study may contribute to practice, theory,and future research.

Context:DifferencesBetween“Hard”and“Soft” Sciences

In an effort to fully exploit their academic re-sources, universities are increasingly looking tonew, untapped intellectual property (IP) pools

to spin off into business ventures. Most effortstarget schools of hard science where most com-mercial innovations tend to arise (Shane, 2004),while entrepreneurial activity resulting from re-search into the humanities is overlooked, ignored,or even discouraged (Akerlind & Kayrooz, 2003;Harmon, 2005).6 Yet few studies attempt to ex-plain this disconnect between the “hard” naturalsciences and the “soft” social sciences. One reasonrelates to the extent of knowledge codification(Arrow, 1962). Hard sciences are characterized byhighly codified knowledge, and produce on aver-age more publications and more start-up firmsthan do the soft sciences.7 Social sciences arecharacterized by research that is less codified(Stephan, 1996), limited in terms of transmittingtacit knowledge through networks and personalcontact, and less likely to influence firm creation(Audretsch et al., 2004).8 For example, a study ofthe history of commercialization activities atStanford University’s music department found sig-nificant differences between musical logic andtechnical/commercial logics (Friedland & Alford,1991; Thornton & Ocasio, 1999).9 So the inter-

ests of the university in reaping economic benefitfrom the scientists’ discoveries could therefore bein conflict with the scientists’ pursuit of academicrecognition. These two opposed institutional log-ics could, however, become complementary if me-diated by individual logics held by influentialleaders and supported by the development of newinstitutional features (Nelson, 2005). Similarly,an Australian study (Harmon, 2005) found thatsocial science research was overwhelmingly drivenby faculty interests and less adaptable to commer-cial ventures. Thus, faculty focused on researchthat either led to innovative teaching methods orbenefitted their personal academic careers. More-over, they were more preoccupied with securingongoing resources for research than producingcommercially motivated outcomes.

TheEntrepreneurialDimensionsofKnowledgeCommercialization

Knowledge commercialization at universities ingeneral encompasses four entrepreneurial di-mensions: (a) industry-sponsored contract re-

search, (b) consulting, (c) technology licensing,and (d) technology development and commercial-ization (Shane, 2002). These dimensions are in-terrelated, and activities classified in each maypotentially lead to the creation of different kindsof spin-offs. Hindle and Yencken (2004) and Har-rison and Leitch (2008) offered a useful overviewof such spin-offs classified by their organizationaltype, business model, and types of individuals in-volved (see Table 1).

Academic Entrepreneurship: AnOngoingProcess

To date, research has predominantly focused ondefining and testing antecedents significant tospin-off formation and has concentrated on exog-enous factors such as the availability of venturecapital, geographic resource proximity, and thepresence of incubators/research parks. Emphasison inputs (funding of basic and applied research)and outputs (patents and revenues generated for

6 Thursby et al. (2001) argued that disclosures represent only a smallportion of the research generated within universities that has potentialcommercial value.

7 For example, long-lived small firms with a substantial public record ofinnovative success, so-called “serial innovators,” are often specialist suppli-ers in markets for technology.

8 Although the knowledge generated by social science and humanitiesschools was not significant to firm creation, it was significant to firmlocation.

9 One example of differing logics is that in the musical/humanitieslogic, scientists strive to be the first to publish, and they are rewarded by theprestige that comes when others quote their publications. They are there-

fore eager to publish their findings. In science/technology, scientists arerewarded in pecuniary terms; that is, they are concerned with economicrent that can be earned from the application of knowledge, and theyaccordingly show more reticence in publishing their findings.


universities through licenses and spinoffs) hasdominated, with little attention paid to the role ofthe individual and the interaction among individ-uals, organizations, environments, resources, andthe processes involved in the commercializationof innovation. Indeed, entrepreneurial activity isnot carried out in a vacuum, independent of con-text. Nor does it take place at a single point intime. Rather, it is an ongoing process of creatingand exploring opportunities and negotiating, mo-bilizing, and organizing resources to extract valuefrom these opportunities (often in the form of newventures). The understanding of entrepreneurshipas a continually developing process is thereforecentral.10 The study of process involves identify-ing sequences of events that describe how thingschange over time. This invites a meso-environ-mental perspective where interactions are de-scribed in their specific context, thus raisingawareness of enabling and constraining influencesof various features of context over time. Further-more, this perspective allows the researcher todescribe how variations in context and processshape outcomes, the pace of change, and the per-formance of a venture.

Process studies can also be historical/retrospec-tive, but in contrast to most retrospective studies,the events with which we are concerned are quiterecent, and they take us fully up to the present.Historical process studies reflect the view thathistory is always present and that new history isalways in the process of being created from currentreality—or that the legacy of the past is alwaysshaping the future. What happens, how it hap-pens, why it happens, and what results it bringsabout are dependent on when it happens, thelocation in the processual sequence, and the placein the rhythm of events characteristic of a givenprocess. Thus, the history of a venture not onlyhighlights the roots of the present by studying thepast, but also provides the means and patterns toplan the future.

ContextasCommunityConceptualizing the university environment ascommunity allows researchers to understand the“how” of an academic entrepreneur creating a newventure as an interactive and sequential eventwithin a specific meso-environment. We thereforerequire a more detailed conceptual framework forspecifically breaking down the meso-environmentinto relevant and manageable pieces with respect

10 See Hindle (2010a) for a detailed understanding of the entrepre-neurial process.

Table1ATaxonomyofUniversity Spin-Offs

Organizational Type ExplanationBusinessModel Explanation

PrincipalOriginator Explanation

Direct research spin-off A company created and owned by (or inpart by) the university for the purposeof commercializing IP

Consultancy-contracting

Set up to deliver services,either technical orknowledge-based, in arole supportive ofregional R&D activities

Faculty member University-employed facultymember

Technology transfercompany

Set up by a university to exploit tacitknowledge that is more process-basedthan patent-based

Productoriented

Developed around aproduct or process thatachieves a sustainablegrowth pattern

Surrogateentrepreneur

Outside managementconsultant, financier, orentrepreneur engaged tobecome CEO of company

Indirect spin-offcompany

Started by current or former faculty orstudents in whom the university doesnot have a direct IP relationship/legalstake

Technologyasset-oriented

Developed around apatented technologicalasset (or platform)

Graduate student Student (usually graduateor postdoctoral) who isenrolled at the university

Spin-in A company spun “in” by existingcompanies to exploit licensed orcollaborative research generated byuniversities

Team Constellation of the aboveor any other alignmentswhere more than oneperson takes lead


to the entrepreneurial actors involved in order torealistically and structurally engage the process ofsense-making. We adopt a conceptual device de-veloped by Hindle (2010b), which serves as adiagnostic regime for this purpose. We refer to itas Hindle’s bridge (HB) for easy reference andreproduce it as Figure 1, below. We use this tool tostudy the dynamic entrepreneur-process-contextrelationship involved in this humanities-baseduniversity spin-off phenomenon. The context istherefore conceptually viewed as a community.The methodological implications of the use of thismodel for the study of entrepreneurship are dis-cussed below.

Data

TheSetting

The setting of the case is a humanities faculty ata medium-size European university businessschool, the Aarhus School of Business (ASB).

The case evolves over a period of about 30 yearsfrom the late 1970s to 2006. The principal actorsare the academic entrepreneur (AE) and a groupthat formed an informal community entrepreneur-

ship facilitation team (henceforth called the com-munity facilitators, or CFs).

The empirical examination used in this study isbased on one key ethnographic narrative (Tro-chim, 2005) written retrospectively by the AE asa life history or auto-ethnographic narrative. Sup-plementary semistructured interview data was pro-vided by key informants (the CFs) who were iden-tified and interviewed by the ethnographer and acoworker. The key informants were stakeholdersin the entire process, chosen because of their vitalimportance as facilitators to the entrepreneurialprocesses. They were not part of the entrepreneur-ial team,11 nor did they have the same incentivesas the entrepreneur. This group includes the rec-tor, the head of the business school’s businessresearch center, a lawyer working for the admin-istration, and an expert legal adviser hired toadvise the university on legal issues in the border-land between public university and private busi-ness. The CFs were asked to recount the univer-sity spin-off process from their perspective and to

11 They were stakeholders, but not part of the entrepreneurial teamproper.

Figure1ConceptualModel: Hindle’sBridge

Source: Hindle, K. (2010b). How community context affects entrepreneurial process: A diagnostic framework. Entrepreneurship and Regional Develop-ment.


provide insights on what facilitated or constrainedthe new private venture creation process withinthe specific public university context.

Tools ofAnalysis

To analyze the data (i.e., the narrative), we used aqualitative methodology.12 Specifically, we usedthe Hindle bridge model (Hindle 2010b) tomap elements of importance to entrepreneurialinitiatives—particularly new venture facilitation—within the context of community, which helps usidentify how context affects process. Two separateresearch teams used content analysis to code datathematically. Coded findings were compared andcontrasted between the two researchers to en-sure validity and then categorized. Secondaryanalysis encompassed firm-based financial data,contractual documents, university archival records,and government documents. Next, we turn tothe narrative.

TheNarrative

The story of our AE covers a period of more than30 years and falls into four stages: pre-firm,nascent, spin-off, and growth phase. We look

at each in turn below.13

ThePre-FirmPhase:BuildingHumanandSocialCapital

The journey of the AE, the narrator in this case,started in 1976 during his studies to become acertified translator. To earn a living while study-ing, he found a part-time job that allowed him toslowly start up a language revision/translationbusiness and to build specialized knowledge ofmedical language, something that would later be acrucial skill in establishing the entrepreneurialventure. He was employed as a part-time lecturer

at the ASB and then as a doctoral student in1987, specializing in linguistic politeness strate-gies—a competence that may well have been use-ful in later negotiations. However, the entrepre-neurial venture might never have come about hadit not been for his fortuitous discovery that thebusiness school had bought a box of index cardswith medical terms from the wife of a deceasedprofessor of English at the ASB who had been aspecialist in medical translation.

The AE perceived the prospects inherent inthis box and negotiated access to the data toproduce the first Danish-English/English-Danishdictionary of medical terms. Publication rightswere negotiated with one of the largest Danishpublishers, which had been approached by a pro-fessor of medicine (henceforth called “the doc-tor”) around the same time to produce a similarproduct. The publishers suggested a joint venturebetween the AE and the doctor, and the twobecame the perfect team. Their complementarycompetences became the basis for a lasting profes-sional cooperation as well as a personal relation-ship. Their dictionary remains the only Danish-English-Danish dictionary of medicine in theworld. The key to the success of this publicationclearly lay in the interdisciplinary nature of theircooperation.

Institutional Knowledge Building

After publishing the medical dictionary, the AEbegan moving up the ranks and became recognizedwithin the university for his vision and forethought.Among other things, he succeeded in attracting sub-stantial European Union (EU) and national researchcouncil grants for building new teaching programs.In 1996 he was elected head of the English depart-ment for two terms, an appointment that allowedhim to develop crucial organizational and adminis-trative capabilities. It also involved substantial in-volvement with the management of the businessschool and negotiations for scarce resources with thevarious deans and rectors.

NascentPhase: EstablishingaCenterofExcellence

At the end of his second term as department head,the AE started to pursue the idea of building a

12 A case study may be defined as a partial, historical, clinical study ofa situation that has confronted a practicing administrator or managerialgroup. Presented in a narrative form, it provides data—substantive andprocess—essential to an analysis of a specific situation and for the framingof alternative action programs and their implementation, recognizing thecomplexity and ambiguity of the practical world.

13 We do not describe the growth phase here. First, we are hereconcerned with the conditions and processes of entrepreneurial spin-offactivities more than with actual firm growth. Second, the growth phase hadonly just begun at the time of writing, so data on this phase are sparse.


center of excellence in medical language (hence-forth “the Center”), which was formed in late2001 as the first of its kind at the language faculty,basically to create an organizational platform atthe ASB for his academic interest in the medicallanguage domain. The Center was formed during aperiod of intense departmental and faculty fight-ing for scarce resources within the university andreceived no resources at the faculty level.

Looking elsewhere for visionary partners andresources, the AE contacted the university’s chieflibrarian. The two shared a history of successful jointfund-raising for innovative information technologyprojects in the interface between learning and infor-mation management. During the first two years ofthe Center’s life, the chief librarian became a keyperson in allowing the entrepreneur free access tothe needed technological resources.

Not long after the establishment of the Center,the AE happened to meet a recent ASB graduate(henceforth called “the co-preneur” to reflect hisde facto role). The chemistry between the twoseemed perfect, and the co-preneur was formallyemployed in 2003 when the Center received itsfirst grant. He quickly became a key actor in allthe AE’s activities.

In Search of Funding

Given the absence of faculty funding to supportthe Center’s activities, external funding became akey priority, and the previous learning from writ-ing successful applications for external grants nowstarted to pay off. The AE strategically designed aseries of overlapping language technology projectsin which knowledge sharing and informationtechnology were key components. Briefly, a ge-neric, dynamic web dictionary was created thatallowed individual users to make their own privatedictionaries while simultaneously accessing ashared web dictionary.14 Adding a technologycomponent to linguistics was a deliberate strategicmove that allowed the AE to seek funding from amuch broader range of government funding pro-grams than those otherwise available to scholarsfrom the humanities and social sciences.

Although originating in the medical languagearea, the idea had potential for extension to otherlanguage domains and other industrial sectors aswell. The projects therefore managed to attractdirect public and EU funding over a three-yearperiod totaling approximately $2 million—anamount at the time unrivaled for a project at theASB, indeed within the humanities in Denmark.This meant that the Center was able to hire itsfirst three technical staff during 2003.

Changing Rules of the Game: Fighting for Survival

This attracted much attention, both locally andnationally, and in 2006 the AE won a prize asresearcher of the year within the humanities andsocial sciences and was awarded a chair (profes-sorship) sponsored by the Danish Business Re-search Academy (DEA), the members of whichcomprise the major Danish universities; employerorganizations; and the Danish ministry of science,technology, and innovation.

During this period, the entire Danish universitysector was being restructured. At the ASB, thelanguage faculty was transformed into a languagedepartment with the same status as the four busi-ness departments of the school in order to pavethe way for a subsequent merger with AarhusUniversity. At the same time, the internal struc-ture was changed, and it was demanded that cen-ters have a strong research focus and critical re-search mass.15 The Center did not meet thesecriteria, as the AE was its only academic staff. Tomaintain the momentum created by the AE andto create an organizational framework withinwhich this more business-oriented, practical/ap-plied approach could be pursued, the ASB decidedto set up a new organizational entity and, inessence, turned the Center into a lab. In 2006, theCenter of Excellence in Medical Language there-fore became the Knowledge Communication Lab(henceforth called “the Lab”). The AE succeedednot only in attracting major funds for his projectsbut in overcoming the structural reorganization,which became the source of much envy and spite-ful criticism by his basic research-oriented col-

14 For a detailed description, see a discussion of the use of collaborativeknowledge repositories in Pilegaard (2009).

15 It was required, among other things, that a research center have anacademic staff of at least 10.


leagues. However, through all this, the AE foundsubstantial backing higher up in the universityfrom the rector,16 and the idea emerged to createa spin-off from the Lab. The AE expected thatpart of the Lab’s R&D projects would have com-mercial potential. The idea of creating a spin-offcaught on with management, and the dean pro-vided funds for the AE to employ a lawyer whowould supervise and assist in putting together aspin-off plan and an organizational setup thatwould be attractive to venture capitalists. The AEsaw this as a strategic move on the part of theASB, in the midst of the university restructuring,to maintain independence and create a uniqueprofile for the business school as a unit enjoyingclose links with businesses, particularly as themerger with the university otherwise curtailed theability of ASB to define its own strategy and actindependently.

Spin-Off

The Lab spin-off, called TermShare, Ltd. (TS),came into existence in 2006 shortly after theformation of the Lab, and the AE was appointedmanaging director of the spin-off. The creation ofTS and the simultaneous transformation of theCenter into a Lab to survive restructuring createdan interesting and very productive role division.According to the AE, it was like being in twoworlds or like riding a tandem, only “I would notalways know which seat to take.” In his capacity ashead of the Lab, the AE had to constantly attractnew private and public R&D capital for newprojects to be able to pay the Lab staff and torecruit industrial partners to test the relevanceand functionality of the software. As managingdirector of the spin-off, the AE simultaneouslyhad to sell the software produced by the Lab.Thus, the Lab continuously expanded, extended,and added new software elements to broaden theproduct portfolio of the spin-off. Once developedby the Lab, the software was transferred from theLab to the spin-off.17

TheRoleof Context in the Spin-Off Process

Pattern matching was used to pull out distinctcontrasts and similarities between the two datasets (i.e., the AE’s narrative and the interviews

with the CFs). We used Hindle’s bridge as a meansof categorizing and making sense of these data,using a step-by-step process (see Hindle, 2010b).The outcomes of this sense-making process arebroken down into headings taken from the twopillars of the model, which, metaphorically, con-textualize the entrepreneurial process (refer to Fig-ure 1, found earlier in the paper).

TheConceptualDiagnostic Framework

Basic Human Resources

The AE was the key community driver of thenew venture. He had the highest proportion ofentrepreneurial capacity invested, owing to hisconsiderable prior knowledge in both the mar-ket and the linguistics field on which the even-tual business was based. The entrepreneurialcapacity was marked by the AE’s innovative-ness, his ability to perceive opportunities andsuccessfully negotiate and communicate value,and his knowledge of how to produce persuasiveapplications. The ability to both compartmen-talize and bridge the institutional culture at thebusiness school and the business cultures18

(twin skills) was a key individual resource(Hindle & Lansdowne, 2005). Several keystakeholders at the ASB took an active role ascommunity facilitators and aided in the newventure process (e.g., legal advice, financialsupport, mentoring, physical resources). Each ofthe CF interviewees identified the support oftop ASB management as crucial to the processof creating the Lab and the spin-off. The CFs allfound that the AE’s individual characteristics(the ability to generate ideas and tirelessly mar-shal their implementation) were important re-sources. In comparison, the AE viewed thementorship given by the key stakeholders andtheir managerial sovereignty as critical to theprocess. Surprisingly, although the principal

16 Dean since the merger of the ASB in early 2008 with AarhusUniversity.

17 At the time of writing, the spin-off has just begun to grow. Adescription of this growth falls outside the scope of the present paper.

18 That is, his ability to address the needs of the pharmaceutical andlife sciences industries for language tools and technologies to facilitatetranslation and improve their communication.


community housing this enterprise was a largebusiness school faculty, the lack of operationalcommunity support for sales/marketing/com-mercialization19 was deemed insignificant bythe CFs.

Basic Physical Resources

The AE, like so many entrepreneurs before him,basically started the business in the basement ofhis house. From there the idea grew into some-thing tangible. Making his ideas of creating soft-ware tools to improve communication and sharingof language data within medicine part of his aca-demic job and committing his large network andmany contacts in life sciences and the pharmaceu-tical industry to R&D projects at the businessschool was an essential part of gaining legitimacywith the current management, legitimacy beingone of the key variables associated with new ven-ture facilitation within the community. Evenhere, it started with zero resources apart from theoffice and its associated computer, telephonelines, and other accoutrements. Getting the tech-nological infrastructure in place represented achallenge because it involved translating the base-line physical resources into a codified institutional(and marketable) framework (i.e., the Lab and thespin-off). Although in-kind physical resourceshelped to facilitate the spin-off, these resourceswere deemed insignificant by the CFs compared toall other factors. However, to the AE, they quicklybecame significant as the venture moved into laterstages.

Governance Mechanisms and the Nature and Role of Institutions

Changes in the Danish University Act in 2003strengthened and professionalized the manage-ment structure of Danish universities. Thisstrongly facilitated the university management’sunderstanding of the moves proposed by the AEand the Center/Lab. The changes also gave therector the necessary discretionary and executivepowers to pursue a spin-off unhampered by a col-

legiate, academic body.20 Finally, the change inmanagement structure meant that fewer manage-ment levels needed to be negotiated by the AE inhis pursuit of his own agenda. Vital to the creationof the spin-off was therefore the dismantling andtransformation of the old cumbersome governancesystem in the university sector in general and therector’s increased discretionary and executivepowers in particular. Naturally, the AE’s positionat the business school was also crucial in providingthe spun-off business with the legitimacy to ap-proach potential partners and customers and gaintheir trust.

One key difference between the two coded datasets is the appearance of “twin skills.” Twin skillswas defined as an institutional theme by the CFs,whereas it was perceived as an individual themeby the AE. Specific references were made by theAE to the fact that, institutionally, developingtwin skills is inherently “schizophrenic,” as theinstitution suffers from rigidities, due process, andincentive structures that openly conflict withcharacteristics that work well in a market situa-tion (North, 1987, 1990). This reinforces thefindings of previous studies that cite conflictinginstitutional and market logics as a key barrier toacademic entrepreneurship, especially in the so-cial sciences and humanities.

Worldviews and Social Networks

It is highly unusual in the university context foran academic from the humanities to “turn busi-nessman.” In this case, the AE’s worldview oftenclashed with that of the “peer culture,” whichperceived his activities to be “off the mark.” Oftenthe AE’s colleagues and immediate peers at thedepartment level were unable to perceive the ad-vantages this could bring both at the departmentlevel and at the school level, seeing only theadded administrative problems that would arise.Fortunately, those few who mattered in the deci-sion-making process at management level weretrained in the social sciences with an economic orbusiness background and usually understood the

19 Thus, the AE was appointed managing director of the spin-off andwas expected to turn the spin-off into a commercial success (personallyundertaking sales, marketing, etc.), while at the same time being Labmanager and researcher.

20 Before the University Act was changed, any change in organiza-tional structure had to be approved by the relevant representative collegiatebody of the ASB.


meaning of “potential profit.” The theme of trustwas framed by the CFs and can be evidenced as animportant factor that helped facilitate the oftendichotomous worldviews held by the communityand the AE: Because management trusted the AE,they allowed him to run counter to the institu-tional and faculty cultures that opposed theseactivities.

One of the major reasons for the success of TSis that the AE combined research in the human-ities with research in knowledge management andadded a language technology component, therebystrengthening language knowledge codification,which had commercial value. This value wastested in practice in R&D projects involving part-ners from competing businesses. The AE was thusable to persuade competitors within the languageservice provider industry that they could partici-pate in the R&D network without divulgingessential business secrets, and that they shouldvolunteer part of their specialized language knowl-edge to a common language knowledge pool inreturn for access to the pool’s shared, validatedknowledge. This is, in effect, a transformation ofthe original Danish co-op spirit, predominant inprimary industries such as milk production, into atechnologically advanced and globally validknowledge-sharing business model. The languageknowledge volunteered by the partners is passedthrough a filter of language specialists employedby the spin-off company, who validate the inputand turn it into output. This process is the busi-ness formula upon which the spin-off prospers.More important, it seems as if the concept can beextended from life sciences to any industries thathas specialized language requirements and a mul-titude of actors. Thus, indirectly, all the actorsinvolved are part of a large network, all contrib-uting to a continued development of knowledge.

Property Rights System and Capital Management Regimes

The intellectual property (IP) rights environmentwithin the university community is governed byDanish legislation that is very similar to the Bayh-Dole Act in the United States (Mowery, Nelson,Sampat, & Ziedonis, 2001). This requires that allIP generated within the university by its faculty or

students be owned by the university.21 In thiscase, the university received a positive valuationon the IP involved, and the value of the IP wasused as an equity stake in the spin-off. The legalcosts for the patenting, incorporation, and licens-ing of the IP were a substantial barrier to theentrepreneur, and thus the property rights systemwithin the community facilitated the spin-offrather than impeding it.

Another institution significant to the commu-nity context at the ASB was the government. TheDanish government supports a proof of conceptgrant system, whereas the university operates aproject-based innovation system. This impliesthat the Danish government views the develop-ment of technology that is IP patentable as aprerequisite for innovation, while the ASB seesthe linkage between proof of concept design andeventual market penetration as a business capac-ity-building exercise. In other words, the ASBemphasized the tacit knowledge (implementa-tion) side of innovation, while government de-partments viewed codified knowledge (technol-ogy) as the pivotal factor.

Boundary Spanning and Mandates

The AE effectively spanned the boundaries be-tween the humanities and social sciences and thebusiness world, highlighting the theme of twinskills once again.22 A business model for the spin-off was therefore designed to allow the AE to spanboundaries both internal and external to the uni-versity. Setting up a Lab with a strong applied (asopposed to research) focus and creating a spin-offpowered by the Lab allowed the Lab to accessresources (from government) to explore collabo-rative partnerships with industry companies.These collaborations served to both access dataand create knowledge value chains by establishingprojects that allowed potential customers to useproducts and provide feedback during an R&Dphase and eventually license end-use software in acommercial setup.

21 The IP can be returned to the inventor if the university deems it oflittle value or does not have the necessary structural capacity to exploit it.

22 Hindle (2010b) describes boundary spanning as any set of processesor activities pursued by individuals or groups that bridges, links, or poten-tially even blurs the nature of two or more separate boundaries.


Boundary spanning within the internal com-munity secured early resources from other depart-ments (i.e., the library) when the line department(i.e., the language department) that was not cul-turally well-aligned for commercialization activi-ties was pushing back. The AE continually movedaround, across, or through physical and culturalboundaries wherever resistance was encountered.Most important, the AE spanned middle manage-ment boundaries that were often hostile, duplici-tous, or simply apathetic to the process and madedirect linkages with top management (wherealignments of mandate better suited the entrepre-neur). As seen in the contrast between the themesraised, legitimacy was a key point with the CFs.The actual activity of boundary spanning pro-vided a distinct legitimacy that helped facilitatethe new venture process.

ASpecificProcessModel ofanEntrepreneurialEvent in theHumanities

The model shown in Figure 2 illustrates the keycomponents of the entrepreneurial process, thesignificance of the entrepreneur, and the six in-terrelated community factors that helped shape itthroughout the entire timeline, which falls intofour stages: a pre-firm phase, a nascent phase, aspin-off phase, and a growth phase. Factors such asspecialization in both business and research gen-eration and the subsequent networks of businesscontacts and community mentors, supporters, andfacilitators throughout the pre-firm and the nas-cent phases provided the foundation for an evolv-ing set of opportunity discovery/evaluation andcommunity support processes important to thespin-off.

The nascent phase is represented by factorssuch as the requirement for a triple “boundary-spanning loop” where the project-based knowl-edge-generation activities of the Lab must be rec-ognized by the spin-off as relevant to its economicinterests. Spin-off activities, in turn, must be rec-ognized by the Lab, the ASB, and the university asrelevant to its academic (Lab), strategic (univer-sity), and economic (ASB) interests, and Lab ac-tivities must be recognized by ASB as relevant toits ambition to align research and commercialactivities. These processes are reflected, generally,

in community support for resource acquisition,legitimization, and the setting up of new institu-tional structures (Lab and spin-off).

The spin-off phase is represented by the themesof ongoing legitimization, the creation of newinstitutional structures, and collaboration with awide range of stakeholders, both internal and ex-ternal to the community. The application of twinskills through boundary spanning is found to behighly significant to these processes. This stagealso illustrates the importance of external partner-ships with a major data-consulting firm, theCSC.23 The partnership with the CSC highlightsthe requirement for external legitimization, real-ized through the creation of new institutionalsupport structures, which helped to midwife thespin-off. Processes at this stage underscore theimportance of strong leadership logic effects andthe need to create new institutional features toalign opposed logics.

The post-spin-off stage is characterized by acontinuing need for changing/aligning norms toallow for planned growth through expanding re-search focuses to align with new markets. It isrepresented by the processes involved in contin-ued institutional support, collaboration, and con-stant application of twin skills to mediate betweenbusiness and research-based worldviews. It shouldbe noted that the twin skills theme appearsthroughout each of the stages, corresponding sig-nificantly to the human resources (how it wasused) and boundary-spanning/mandates (where itwas used) domains. The entrepreneurial processfor this specific spin-off event is illustrated below.

Discussion

The present case of academic entrepreneurshipportrays the complexities involved in the dy-namic and highly nonlinear process of entre-

preneurship within the context of a humanitiesand management school taking its first entrepre-neurial steps through the activity of research com-

23 The data-consulting firm, the CSC, specializes in developing soft-ware and running software applications for the Danish healthcare sector.The CSC drew up a business case, and a licensing agreement was signedbetween the spin-off and the CSC granting the CSC license to sell thesoftware on the Danish market.


mercialization and creating a new spin-off com-pany. It is based on a long history, and its eventualsuccess hinged on a gradual shift in institutionalpriorities, governance structures, and the entre-preneur’s personal competences. The conceptual-ization of context as community has helped usunderstand the entrepreneurial process by deter-mining the sequences that lead to effective newventure performance. It has also helped us identifyinterrelated factors that operate concomitantlyand recursively throughout the life cycle of theuniversity spin-off process. The study thus breaksdown and makes sense of the structural dynamicsthat exist between the main entrepreneur and theuniversity meso-environment, and it illustrateshow these forces continuously interact and influ-ence each other across the entire entrepreneurialprocess.

The study has identified elements that may be

deemed critical to entrepreneurial success withinthe humanities—in particular, developing twinskills and applying twin skills to the process. Thetwin skills construct is characterized by the capac-ity to effectively navigate through two or morediverse environments by synthesizing or compart-mentalizing specific worldviews when necessary inthe pursuit and eventual exploitation of entrepre-neurial opportunities. This is strongly evidencedby the overlapping triple boundary-spanning loopsdeveloped by the AE that required expert knowl-edge of business-, research-, and institutional-based worldviews, and provided the means foraligning competing institutional logics. Throughthe constant shaping and reshaping of communityand process, twin skills are found to be crucial forachieving successful outcomes.

The present case thus correlates well with theobservations made at Stanford University (Nel-

Figure2General ProcessModel of theUniversity Spin-Off


son, 2005) that identified potential disconnectsbetween the hard and soft sciences. The use oftwin skills by the AE in the case presented reso-nates with Nelson’s description of aligning com-peting logics at Stanford as described above, as theAE focused on overlapping areas of knowledgegeneration that allowed a virtuous circle of newresearch to be propagated through commercialvalue discovery/alignment, effectively using indi-vidual leadership, community support, and bound-ary spanning to overcome these polarities. This, inturn, shaped a set of new “logics” for the universitythat resulted in a new institutional infrastructure(i.e., the Lab). We believe that our findings ofopposition at the line department level also con-firm the perception in the humanities that teach-ing and research take precedence over a focus onentrepreneurship and commercialization (Har-man, 2005).

Other factors also help ensure a successful en-trepreneurial outcome. They include establishinginstitutional legitimacy, winning and maintainingsupport from institutional leadership over that ofpeers, requiring institutional restructuring, and re-lying on boundary spanning (as a basis for devel-oping twin skills). These factors may be univer-sally important in academic entrepreneurship, asevidenced by many cases, and they may, indeed,be particularly important in the social sciencesand humanities context, as illustrated in thepresent case.

Finally, this case illustrates the importance ofknowledge codification to the activity of technol-ogy transfer. We find that it has special signifi-cance and may partially explain a “disconnect”between the hard and soft sciences that toucheson the current debate on the nature of patents(Bessen & Meurer, 2008; Ziedonis, 2008). Theprevailing policy and market focus on knowledgecodification and the protection of IP may poten-tially have an adverse effect on knowledge transferspecific to the social sciences and humanities. Wehave shown that the technology-oriented focus ofstakeholders who provide resources (governments,universities, investors) and the structural mecha-nisms for distributing these resources leaves socialscience research-based faculty with comparativelyfew options for entrepreneurship. It therefore ap-

pears that the pillars needed to support the“bridge” connecting social sciences research toentrepreneurial outcomes must conform to thisoverarching ideology. In effect, the barriers thatmust be overcome are higher in the soft than inthe hard sciences and are significantly influencedby community-based factors such as culturalnorms and institutional structure. This has severalimplications for future research.

Directions for FutureResearch

One of the broad challenges facing researchers inany field (or subfield) is to present empiricalresults that can be compared and contrasted

with other studies of similar phenomena by using auniform philosophical approach, comparable mea-sures, and similar and reproducible methods. It is inthis manner that cumulative work can be accom-plished that is important to theory building andeventually applied to best practice. Our approach tothis study is grounded in the epistemological domainof interpretivism,24 is guided by theory on process,and uses a methodological cluster featuring auto-ethnographic techniques and a novel diagnostic toolfor measuring factors that constrain or facilitate en-trepreneurial activity within a community. We en-courage researchers to adopt similar approaches tostudying entrepreneurial events within an academiccontext for four reasons. First, there is a prevailingquantitative methodological bias in entrepreneur-ship research (McDonald, Gan, & Anderson, 2004).This is also reflected in the subfield of academicentrepreneurship (Rothaermel et al., 2007). How-ever, “entrepreneurship begins with a disjointed, dis-continuous, nonlinear (and usually unique) eventthat cannot be studied with the methods developedfor studying smooth, continuous, and linear (andoften repeatable) processes” (Bygrave 1989, p. 7).Indeed, “researchers have thus far explained entre-preneurship not as the creation of artifacts by imag-inative actors fashioning purpose and meaning out ofcontingent endowments and endeavors, but as theinevitable outcome of mindless ‘forces,’ stochasticprocesses, or environmental selection” (Sarasvathy,

24 Interpretivism is a paradigm in which interaction and meaning arecentral to society, and it assumes that meanings are created throughinteraction.


2001, pp. 261–262). In order to remedy these short-comings in the extant literature, a concentrated fo-cus on qualitative studies of this type may offer newinsights into academic entrepreneurship. As well, acumulative body of work in this area may providethe opportunity for contrast and comparison to bemade across a wide spectrum of events and contexts,allowing for pattern recognition and the develop-ment of practice-based theory.

Second, researchers must strive to correctlymatch the phenomenon being studied with the ap-propriate suite of research methods. We believe thatthe methodological cluster used in this paper wasappropriate for studying the entrepreneurial process(the actions of the entrepreneur, team, and commu-nity facilitators) and its dualistic relationship withcontext (the meso-environment or “community” inquestion) and is especially well-aligned for the studyof academic entrepreneurship.

Third, Hindle’s bridge represents a diagnostic toolthat conveys to the researcher an ability to structur-ally measure a community’s ability to facilitate en-trepreneurial outcomes. It is useful across a range ofqualitative methodological clusters and may providethe necessary framework with which to align thestudy of entrepreneurial process across an infinitenumber of contexts, making it highly aligned withpractice-based theory building.

Fourth, and perhaps most important, researchersmust ask the right questions where insight and rel-evance are important factors for guiding research.Questions on entrepreneurship often revolve aroundthe aspects of who, why, what, and when. We arguethat a focus on the how should be an overarchingconsideration of researchers who study entrepreneur-ship. For example, the differences among entrepre-neurs are evidenced to be greater than the differ-ences between entrepreneurs and nonentrepreneurs,so the study of who is an entrepreneur, althoughimportant and interesting, has not been overly fruit-ful with respect to theory relating to practice, espe-cially from research on individual traits. By focusingour attention on how context shapes process, weseek to understand the whole (the entrepreneurialevent) in conjunction with its parts (individuals,organizations, environments).

With respect to the phenomenon under study,the cornerstones of European research are the “re-

search actors” (i.e., research organizations and re-searchers) who are subjected to governance mea-sures that strongly influence what research is doneand how. The rise in the importance of competitivefunding has gradually changed the practice of uni-versity teaching and research toward an interdisci-plinary and transorganizational model. However, thecriteria for evaluating individual, group, and organi-zational performance remain far too traditional. En-trepreneurial activities often do not contribute tocareer advancement; moreover, no or little merit isearned by obtaining outside funding. For example,doing innovative work that directly feeds into policyis widely thought of as being of lesser quality. Amajor challenge for future research is to em-brace the methods we have laid out to focus onthe structural components of community in amuch narrower manner in order to delve deeperinto these questions, with particular attentionpaid to the specific context of the humanitiesand social sciences.

Conclusion

We conclude that there is value to be foundin adopting entrepreneurial approaches tostructural change within the social sciences

and humanities. They may well represent a seriesof pathways for rethinking academic educationand research, addressing societal needs and devel-oping new methods for funding mechanisms. Thispaper demonstrates that it is possible to learn fromwhat we may dub the “opportunistic embrace” ofthose who have successfully pioneered entrepre-neurial processes within the social sciences andhumanities disciplines. Cases where humanitiesand social science faculty in search of fundingembrace domains that enjoy (traditional) policymakers’ and fund managers’ attention—for exam-ple, by adding a linguistic dimension to technol-ogy (as in language technology), by adding ele-ments of philosophy to science (as in nanoethics),or by adding ethnography to medicine (as in med-ical anthropology)—offer exciting new vistas forentrepreneurship researchers. We may also learnfrom existing best practices within the hard sci-ences, and through trial and error determine whatworks and what does not. Thus contrast and com-parison between the two are necessary. Hence, we


must explore practices at those institutions thathave searched for a new and better balance be-tween traditional and innovative forms of re-search (and teaching) involving intra-, inter- andtransdisciplinary approaches to further innova-tion. By adopting the proper set of qualitativeresearch techniques, and uniformly applying themto study new frontiers in research, we may betterunderstand not only academic entrepreneurshipin the social sciences and humanities, but perhapsa bit more about entrepreneurship in general.

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