Addressing academic researcher priorities through science and technology entrepreneurship education

A key feature of the movement to create more entrepreneurial universities is incentivizing researchers to move discoveries beyond the laboratory and into society. This places additional expectations on Ph.D. students and faculty in science and engineering disciplines, who are encouraged to explore the commercialization of their research to promote the role of universities in innovation and job creation. A major barrier to this movement is that traditional Ph.D. training does not prepare researchers to participate in entrepreneurial activity, and as such its relevance to scientific work may not be evident. In this paper, we propose a course model for science and technology entrepreneurship education that has been designed to enable academic researchers to play a more active and informed role in the commercialization of their discovery. Its curricular foundation is a set of 14 factors that address the following four priorities: (1) technology readiness and timing, (2) intellectual property pathway decisions, (3) engagement with the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and (4) personal career choices. We describe the rationale for the course, its content and outcomes.