Abstract
After decades of relying on oil to generate economic growth, Saudi Arabia is pursuing a new, knowledge-based development strategy. Beyond simply increasing investment in education, a key component of the new strategy is to foster the entrepreneurial activities of scientists in order to create economic growth and enhance international competitiveness. This chapter seeks to analyse and identify the specific conditions in Saudi Arabia that either promote or inhibit scientist entrepreneurship. Future work on the subject will be merited to study actual start-up behaviour and determinants of success or failure. Also, the somewhat unexpected findings on female entrepreneurship call for a good deal more investigation, including how and why nascent female entrepreneurs decide to start companies and, more importantly, what start-up method they choose. For instance, do females use proxy start-ups, such as family networks, or openly start a company by themselves? Another study limitation is the lack of a codified human capital stock in Saudi Arabia (and in the Middle East in general), which indicates that future research may need to identify proper proxy variables to quantify human capital.
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Notes
- 1.
The participation of women in entrepreneurship is about two-thirds that of men across countries, taking national variances into consideration (Minniti and Arenius 2003).
- 2.
However, Aldridge and Audretsch (2011) did not find statistical evidence for any such positive relationship among a sample of high-performing university scientists in the United States.
- 3.
For example, scientists at Saudi Arabian universities have only recently been allowed by law to engage in entrepreneurial activity.
Acknowledgments
This chapter was contributed by David Audretsch, Ahmed Alshumaimri, Taylor Aldridge, and Marcie Hummel.
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© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Audretsch, D., Alshumaimri, A., Aldridge, T. (2013). University-Industry Cooperation and Conditions for Start-Ups. In: Andersson, T., Djeflat, A. (eds) The Real Issues of the Middle East and the Arab Spring. Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5248-5_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5248-5_16
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