New skills for entrepreneurial researchers

Abstract

Knowledge exchange between universities and business in collaborative/ contractual research and public-private partnerships has become far more significant. These developments instigate new mind-sets and skills for academic researchers, that should be able to translate their new technological concepts into new (business) developments. Using the two entrepreneurial functions—identification and exploitation— Park (Technovation 25: 739-752, 2005); Wright et al. (J. Technol. Transfer 29: 235-246, 2004) as well as the Vitae Researcher Development Framework (www.vitae.ac.uk) and Entrepreneurial competency framework (Int. J. Entrepreneur. Behav. Res. 6(2): 92-111, 2010), this chapter looks at the new, entrepreneurial skills that any academic researcher needs to make commercial exploitation of research a success. The purpose of this article is to investigate which (i.e. entrepreneurial) skills academic researchers need to facilitate to be more effective in exploiting their research. We especially focus on the academic researcher with a beta-scientific background.