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Creating entrepreneurial networks: academic entrepreneurship, mobility and collaboration during PhD education

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Abstract

Network-building activities of PhD students are an important area of study in furthering our understanding of academic entrepreneurship. This paper focuses on PhD students’ participation in network-building activities defined as mobility and collaboration, as well as own interest in and perceived grade of support for commercialisation from various levels of the university hierarchy. The results of a large-scale survey (of 1,126 PhD students at Linköping University, Sweden, 41% response rate) presented here show that the majority of PhD students are engaged in collaborations with external organisations, though quite few (one quarter) have spent a part of their PhD education outside their home university. PhD students from all faculties are on average interested in commercialisation and in favour of it. However, PhD students from the faculty of Health Sciences state that it is difficult for them to combine research and commercialisation. Furthermore, interest in commercialisation of research results is relatively lowest amongst those PhD students who are undertaking mobility placements at other universities, thus pointing to an experienced incompatibility of research and academic entrepreneurship.

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Notes

  1. This definition is in line with the argument by Jöns (2009) that shows how a long-term cumulative process of mobility and collaboration contributes to the development of post-war German academic system.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank HELIX VINN Excellence Centre for financial support of the project and the PhD students of Linköping University for responding to the survey. We are also grateful to three anonymous peer reviewers for providing us with most valuable comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management and Engineering and HELIX VINN Excellence Centre, Linköping University, 581 83, Linköping, Sweden

    Dzamila Bienkowska & Magnus Klofsten

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  1. Dzamila Bienkowska
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  2. Magnus Klofsten
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Correspondence to Dzamila Bienkowska.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4 and 5.

Table 4 PhD students’ opinions categorised according to type of mobility placement (tested for significant differences between groups)
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Table 5 PhD students’ opinions categorised according to type of collaboration (tested for significant differences between groups)
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Bienkowska, D., Klofsten, M. Creating entrepreneurial networks: academic entrepreneurship, mobility and collaboration during PhD education. High Educ 64, 207–222 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-011-9488-x

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