Academic Entrepreneurship: Spin-offs in Sweden and the UK

  • Åsa Teres Lindholm Dahlstrand
  • Helen Lawton Smith
  • Nabhassorn Baines
Chapter
Part of the International Studies in Entrepreneurship book series (ISEN, volume 32)

Abstract

Discussions of academic entrepreneurship often focus on efforts to commercialize inventions appropriated within the intellectual property (IP) system. However, studies in the U.S. have shown that a substantial amount of entrepreneurship happens outside of the formal IP system.

In the UK each university sets its own rules on ownership of IP. In a few European countries, like Sweden, an inventor ownership model is dominating. There is a lack of studies of European academic entrepreneurship outside of the formal IP system; and accordingly there have been few possibilities to analyze the effects of different institutional set ups.

To help fill this gap, this chapter analyses how different institutional settings affect academic entrepreneurship in Europe. By analyzing both patents and spin-offs (from Oxford University, UK and Chalmers University, Sweden) we will shed light on two processes for commercialization of university research. We empirically investigate university technology transfer at two different universities in two countries with a different inventor ownership regulation.

Keywords

Academic Entrepreneurship Commercialization University spin-offs Patents Institutional setting 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Hallur Sigurdarsson, CBS, Denmark and Sten Dieden, CIRCLE, Lund University, for assistance with the Chalmers data.

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Åsa Teres Lindholm Dahlstrand
    • 1
  • Helen Lawton Smith
    • 2
  • Nabhassorn Baines
    • 2
  1. 1.CIRCLELund UniversityLundSweden
  2. 2.BirkbeckUniversity of LondonLondonUK

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