Abstract
University technology transfer constitutes an important pillar in challenging the transition of inventions to innovations. Its contribution to the development of entrepreneurial ecosystems lies therefore at the heart of entrepreneurial activity. While specific approaches model such ecosystems as quadruple helix, consisting of the interplay of government, university, enterprises, and society, broader approaches attempt to decompose such ecosystems into more granular single actors such as enterprising individuals, start-ups, established firms, (regional) policy makers, venture capitalists, etc. This paper focuses on the heart of knowledge generation and investigates practices of university-based technology knowledge dissemination by reviewing current approaches and best practices. We merge our conceptual findings into a micro-macro-level model in order to provide theoretical as well as practical implications to support the transition from inventions to innovations.
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Notes
- 1.
Although the theory of synergetics is often displayed as the theory of self-organization, it must be noted that with the theory of dissipative structures (Prigogine, 1955), fractal geometry (Mandelbrot, 1987), catastrophe theory (Liening, 2017) and chaos theory (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984), there exist further theoretical, interrelated approaches to examine complexity in self-organizing phenomena. For instance, the theory of dissipative structures focuses on energy supply to systems being absent from equilibration, which are necessarily constituted as open systems. The latter is a necessary condition for synergetic behavior.
- 2.
While, for example, an entrepreneurial mindset can occur as order parameter within an individual’s cognitive system (Liening et al., 2016), this mindset may simultaneously serve on a team level (e.g., within a start-up) as one element between many mindsets of other entrepreneurs.
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Liening, A., Geiger, JM., Haarhaus, T., Kriedel, R. (2021). University Technology Transfer as Control Parameter of Complex Entrepreneurial Ecosystems. In: Mietzner, D., Schultz, C. (eds) New Perspectives in Technology Transfer. FGF Studies in Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61477-5_15
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