Piero Formica

Entrepreneurial Universities The Value of Education in Encouraging Entrepreneurship

Whether or not a society can be called ‘entrepreneurial’ depends in part on the legitimacy and esteem accorded to those who pursue the entrepreneurial route. Communities in which entrepreneurship can thrive create more jobs and wealth. Entrepreneurship foments the Schumpeterian process of creative destruction by which the new replaces the old. New opportunities are perceived, capitalized and converted into marketable products or services. Fresh competition in the free market economy and the breaking down of international borders will significantly influence new company formation and the underlying models of entrepreneurial motion. Ample opportunities for creativity and innovation are driving the move towards the formation of small businesses that from the start enter into a fast and high-growth phase – the so-called ‘entrepreneurial growth’ companies. Is there a distinctive role for education in enhancing entrepreneurial capacity bringing together entrepreneurial capacity and opportunities, and thus expanding local entrepreneurial activity in the form of entrepreneurial growth companies? In addressing this question, the paper first looks at two basic models of entrepreneurial motion – the small business model and the growth model – and then investigates the concepts of entrepreneurial learning and organizations for entrepreneurial education (the entrepreneurial universities). Entrepreneurial universities foster interaction and networking. They embed entrepreneurship in academic culture in order to achieve economic returns from the knowledge generated through research projects, empowered teams of teachers, students and business people, face-to-face and electronic relationships, and networked enterprises emerging from their spin-off activity. Finally, the paper identifies agents in the market and seed funds as instrumental organizations in the role of entrepreneurial universities. Endowed with high education and marketable skills, those agents support the new company in creating its own market. Seed funds provide risk-bearing capital and management support, which are complementary ingredients to money and intangible assets from the founder, family and friends.

Accelerating Venture Creation and Building on Mutual Strengths in Experimental Business Labs

This paper articulates the opportunity of using an experimental business laboratory approach as a means of accelerating the creation, incubation and testing of new venture ideas. Such a strategy leads to the establishment of a micro-ecosystem of aspiring entrepreneurs and others in a business laboratory environment. The goal is to create a mini idea-supercollider, in which a microscopic ‘De Medici Effect’ (Johansson, 2004) can be achieved, with aspiring entrepreneurs with different ideas, experiences and disciplines meeting in a spirit of open innovation – the sum of the whole being much greater than the sum of the individual parts. The development of an ecosystem for idea generation and rapid testing using business simulation tools can accelerate the creation, mobilization and diffusion stages of the knowledge lifecycle (Birkinshaw and Sheehan, 2002) in a knowledge- driven entrepreneurship venture, while de-risking potential ventures before significant capital is applied.

Laboratory Experiments as a Tool in the Empirical Economic Analysis of High-Expectation Entrepreneurship

Experimentation for the entrepreneur will often focus on adoption of the innovation and the value that is created for both the end consumer of the innovation and the entrepreneur and the potential ecosystem that is required to deliver the innovation. For an innovation to be sustainable the innovation has to deliver value to the end consumer, the entrepreneur, and the innovation and delivery ecosystem, otherwise the innovation and entrepreneurial activity half-life will be short.

University Ecosystems Design Creative Spaces for Start-Up Experimentation

Religious roots marked the medieval university, alma mater of the Second Millennium higher education institutions. For centuries, the ‘ivory tower’ syndrome, a reminiscence of their monastic lineage, has affected academic institutions. Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created universities (society) that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift”. This kind of thinking pervaded, limiting the scope of some universities to knowledge and student production. It seems that analysis has taken precedence over synthesis/creation (in addition to theory always taking precedence over practice). This dissonance between the work of a university and value creation was hinted at by CK Prahalad at the 2010 Global Drucker Forum when he said, “I have never seen a next practice emerge from a regression analysis”.

Capitalizing on Open Innovation 2.0

New venture creation takes place within human–human and human–technology interactions. Experiencing interactions as they occur in the real life is in the nature of business creation. Open Innovation 2.0 (OI 2.0) is an emergent and powerful new paradigm for balancing hands-on experimentation with theoretical knowledge. In doing so, OI 2.0 provides the opportunities for elevating high ambition entrepreneurship through systemic changes, instead of piecemeal siloed reforms, in the experimentation process.

Experiencing Experiments: A Multiplayer Game for Sharing Ideas: Crusoe Gives Way to Gulliver

In this latest in a series of articles on the innovative use of experimental business laboratories for high-expectation entrepreneurs, the authors focus on the networking benefits of business lab experiments. Distinguishing between ‘Robinson Crusoe’ types, whose tendency is to operate in isolation, and ‘Lemuel Gulliver’ types, who rely on interaction with others, they suggest that engaging Crusoe entrepreneurs in the open participatory environment of the experimental laboratory encourages them to discard their bad habit of working in a closed environment in favour of interaction and sharing. This, the authors argue, is an essential change in light of the evolving process of innovation, which is moving from a closed process through an open one towards a future in which competing innovation networks become the norm. They demonstrate the nature of contemporary entrepreneurship and innovation by drawing analogies from physics and the article closes with a case study of their theory in practice.

The Concentration of Resources and Academic Performance: Reinventing Learning and Research in the 21st Century

The more money governments put into elite universities, the better those institutions will perform, with the associated benefits for the national R&D system, and the more likely it is that their academics’ work will be published in highly reputed journals. This is a cherished tenet of most European public educational and research policies, which are currently under attack. Yet, the strategy of concentrating public money on the ‘citadel’ of a few select academic institutions for the dual purpose of education and research (as is done, for example, in Germany, Sweden and the UK) is highly questionable. What matters far more is the creation of a free and ‘co-opetitive’ environment which, through the interrelated forces of competition and cooperation, will spur all universities – not just the most prestigious – to innovative excellence across all aspects of their activities. In Europe, this is the much-needed environment – not one that complies with the standards of the US-style elite universities. There are various reasons for this proposition. Size is not always an advantage: this is now clearly understood in the private sector. Nimble and more flexible structures, less subject to the pressures of well-established incumbent interests, carry great advantages. Moreover, in the ‘gloCalizing’ (globalizing and localizing) knowledge economy and society, the ideas and knowledge marketplace is not divided into towns and regions but into affinity groups that derive from a high propensity to sociability and are structured by knowledge creation, diffusion and use modalities (in other words, ‘knowledge-ducts’ along which flow ‘knowledge nuggets’ such as innovation networks and knowledge clusters – see Carayannis and Gonzalez, 2003). From this perspective, as Kim et al (2006) point out, the prestige and authority of the traditional mainstay of academic institutions will be eroded by the reduced importance of physical access to productive research colleagues now that the decline in communication costs has changed the formerly localized nature of research interaction. In Europe, on the other hand, the proliferation of second-rate research universities has raised the lid on the quality of education and the fragmentation of research. We therefore propose that universities, university-related institutions and firms should join together in innovation networks and knowledge clusters (see Formica, 2003; Carayannis and Campbell, 2006). Even if the division of labour and the functional specialization of organizations persist with regard to the type of R&D activity, universities, university-related institutions and firms can nevertheless carry out basic and applied research and experimental development. The concept of the ‘entrepreneurial university’ captures the need to link university research more closely with the R&D market activities of the firm. Just as important as the entrepreneurial university, however, is the concept of the ‘academic firm’, which represents the complementary business organization and strategy vis-à-vis the entrepreneurial university.

Governance Frameworks for International Public Goods: The Case of Concerted Entrepreneurship.

Dr Thomas Andersson is President of Jönköping University, Jönköping University, PO Box 1026, SE-551 11 Jönköping, Sweden. E-mail: thomas.andersson@iked.org. He is also President of the Board of the International Organization for Knowledge Economy and Enterprise Development (IKED) and Vice President of the International Network for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (INSME). Dr Piero Formica is Professor of Economics, with a special focus on innovation and entrepreneurship, in Jönköping University’s International Business School, and Dean of the International Entrepreneurship Academy, also at Jönköping University. In addition, he is Special International Professor of Knowledge Economics and Entrepreneurship at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, PR China, Scientific Director of the Higher Education Programmes at COFIMP, Bologna, Italy, and Visiting Professor of Knowledge Economics and Entrepreneurship at the University of Malta in Rome, Italy. E-mail: piero.formica@hj.se.

Innovative Players in Economic Development in Europe: ‘Learning’ Companies and ‘Entrepreneurial’ Universities in Action within Territorial and Business Ecosystems of Innovation

This article analyses the behaviour of ‘learning’ companies and ‘entrepreneurial’ universities in the context of the territorial and business ecosystems of innovation in which they are involved. Against a background of the fundamental differences between the higher education and the commercial sector, and the history of university—industry cooperation in Europe, the characteristics of territorial ecosystems for innovation (TEIs) are set out and the holistic, networking and interactive models of knowledge and technology transfer are discussed. This analysis provides a conceptual framework for the successful development of territorial ecosystems of innovation which are identified as crucial for future successful European socio-economic development. As concrete examples of activities which contribute towards this end, the authors offer brief case studies of the Economic Development Unit and Innovation Centre at the University of North London and the London Technopole Initiative.

In Search of the Origin of an ‘Open Innovation’ Culture

Abstract In the knowledge economy, greater togetherness is the prerequisite for innovating and having more: selflessness extends scope while selfishness increases limitations. But human beings are not automatically attracted to innovation: between the two lies culture and cultural values vary widely, with the egoistic accent or the altruistic intonation setting the scene. In the representations of open innovation we submit to the reader’s attention, selfishness and selflessness are active in the cultural space. Popularized in the early 2000s, open innovation is a systematic process by which ideas pass among organizations and travel along different exploitation vectors. With the arrival of multiple digital transformative technologies and the rapid evolution of the discipline of innovation, there was a need for a new approach to change, incorporating technological, societal and policy dimensions. Open Innovation 2.0 (OI2) – the result of advances in digital technologies and the cognitive sciences – marks a shift from incremental gains to disruptions that effect a great step forward in economic and social development. OI2 seeks the unexpected and provides support for the rapid scale-up of successes. ‘Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come’ – this thought, attributed to Victor Hugo, tells us how a great deal is at stake with open innovation. Amidon and other scholars have argued that the twenty-first century is not about ‘having more’ but about ‘being more’. The promise of digital technologies and artificial intelligence is that they enable us to extend and amplify human intellect and experience. In the so-called experience economy, users buy ‘experiences’ rather than ‘services’. OI2 is a paradigm about ‘being more’ and seeking innovations that bring us all collectively on a trajectory towards sustainable intelligent living.