ABSTRACT
Schumpeter (1942) suggested that powerful forces wrought by creative destruction, when entrepreneurial firms exploit radical innovation, can overwhelm entire industries through competence-destroying forces. Increasingly, research universities act as an important locus of the type of radical innovation Schumpeter described. Their inventions continue to influence a diverse set of industries including biotechnology, computer software and robotics, just to name a few (Siegel 2006). At the same time, an increasing number of universities in North America, Europe and Asia, as well as in a number of developing countries, have become entrepreneurial (Thursby and Thursby 2011). This change in the locus of innovation has created serious appropriation issues: the dispersal of residual claims associated with invention is increasingly ambiguous, straining traditional innovation systems (Coff 1999; Markman et al. 2008). This ambiguity is especially acute at research universities for three reasons: first, commercialization is a result of a scientist’s voluntary participation in the process (Fabrizio and Di Minin 2008); second, universities and other influential stakeholders have only recently placed a premium on earning rents from discoveries (Stuart and Ding 2006); lastly, universities’ track records of commercialization are spotty at best (Litan et al. 2008).
