When Two Worlds Collide: An Examination of the Influence of Academic Entrepreneurship on Academic Roles and Motivations of University Faculty

Academic entrepreneurship refers to university faculty engagement in commercialization of research and innovative activities that are beyond their academic work in research, teaching, and service in their university. Academic entrepreneurship includes three types of entrepreneurial activities: academic patenting, technology licensing, and generations of university spin-off firms. The present investigation focuses on faculty entrepreneurs who are engaged in university spin-off firms (USOs) and examines how faculty entrepreneurs perceive their two roles—the entrepreneurial role and academic role—in the university and how they reconcile the tensions between these roles. Critical scholars have claimed that academic entrepreneurship has inherent conflicts with faculty’s academic roles in research and teaching and could lead to an erosion of university missions in the education of students and service to the public (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). However, empirical evidence suggests otherwise: Faculty participation in entrepreneurial activities benefits the missions of the university—by generating more research, more revenue, and more economic impact (e.g., Azouley et al., 2009). This scholarly debate motivates the present investigation to address how faculty entrepreneurs, if at all, change or alter their academic roles and priorities in the context of academic entrepreneurship. The investigation relies upon a qualitative research design with a dilemma analysis approach to interview. The primary data rely on 40 semi-structured interviews with faculty entrepreneurs in Bioengineering and Computer Science departments at University of California, Los Angeles, University of California, Irvine, and University of California, Riverside. Additional data were collected from Entrepreneurship Center directors and students who study with the faculty participants with regard to faculty engagement in entrepreneurial activities. The three universities were selected based on their entrepreneurial outputs: UCLA, UCI, and UCR are respectively at high, medium, and early stage of their entrepreneurial process. Findings indicate that faculty entrepreneurs adopt a hybrid logic of academic professionalism and entrepreneurship to connect their entrepreneurial engagement with their academic roles. By doing so, faculty participants developed an academic entrepreneurial identity—they possess both academic values and entrepreneurial norms and attribute a social mission to their entrepreneurial activities. To construct and develop an academic entrepreneurial identity, faculty entrepreneurs are obliged to segregate their audiences between academics and entrepreneurs, as well as their resources for their academic research and their entrepreneurial research. They also delegate their work to either their students or business entrepreneurs to maintain their main academic identities. In faculty’s balancing the two roles, the institutional environment and support of the university play critical roles. If the university mission aligns with the entrepreneurial goals of faculty, then faculty entrepreneurs are more likely to integrate their entrepreneurial activities into their teaching and instruction. In turn, the enhanced teaching and instruction can contribute to the educational goals of their university. However, if the university’s mission does not align with the goals of faculty entrepreneurial activities, then faculty are most likely to find themselves caught in conflicts between their two roles, where they cannot achieve a balance, and, eventually, they have to give up either the entrepreneurial role or the academic role. Implications for policies and practices are discussed in the final chapter of the dissertation