Description
During this such a brief breakdown related to entrepreneurship education in non business schools.
Final Report 2011
Entrepreneurship Education in
Non-Business Schools
Best practice for Australian contexts of
knowledge and innovation communities
Chris Collet
ALTC Teaching Fellow
Support for this Fellowship was provided by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council Ltd.,
which is an initiative of the Australian Government. The views expressed in this report do not
necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council or the Australian
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2011
ISBN
978-0-642-78204-5 [PRINT]
978-0-642-78205-2 [PDF]
978-0-642-78206-9 [RTF]
Table of Contents
Definitions ............................................................................................................................................................................ 2
About the Author ............................................................................................................................................................... 2
Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................................................... 2
Executive Summary ......................................................................................................................................................... 3
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................................ 4
The Research – Industry Nexus .............................................................................................................................. 4
Why does Australia need entrepreneurship education? ............................................................................. 5
Why this Fellowship?.................................................................................................................................................. 7
Program Aims and Approaches................................................................................................................................... 7
Aims ................................................................................................................................................................................... 7
Approach to Activities ................................................................................................................................................ 8
Aim 1: Skills for Innovation Commercialisation ......................................................................................... 8
Aim 2: Best Practice Exemplars of Entrepreneurship Education ...................................................... 10
Aim 3: Resource Development for Entrepreneurship Education ...................................................... 12
Skills for Innovation Commercialisation ............................................................................................................... 13
Respondent characteristics .................................................................................................................................... 14
Credentialism ............................................................................................................................................................... 14
Graduate Skills ............................................................................................................................................................. 17
A Model ........................................................................................................................................................................... 20
Vignettes of Best Practice ............................................................................................................................................ 23
Masters by Research ................................................................................................................................................. 24
The TEC Program – North Carolina State University .................................................................................. 26
Center for Student Innovation – Rochester Institute of Technology .................................................... 28
E*ntrepreneurship at Rensselaer – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ................................................. 30
IDEA – Northeastern University .......................................................................................................................... 32
Innovation Space – Arizona State University ................................................................................................. 34
Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship ............................................................................................................ 36
Maison de l’Entrepreneuriat – Université de Grenoble .............................................................................. 39
Center für Innovation and Entrepreneurship – Karlsruhe Institute of Technology ....................... 40
Charity Entrepreneurship – Dublin Institute of Technology ................................................................... 41
The Hothouse – Dublin Institute of Technology ............................................................................................ 43
Fellowship Outcomes @ QUT ..................................................................................................................................... 44
The QUT Innovation Space ..................................................................................................................................... 46
History ....................................................................................................................................................................... 46
The QIS Explained (Advertising material) .................................................................................................. 47
Current QIS Activities .......................................................................................................................................... 49
The Q_Hatchery ........................................................................................................................................................... 51
The Q_Hatchery Explained (Advertising material) ................................................................................. 51
Current (proto-) Q_Hatchery Status .............................................................................................................. 53
University-Wide Competitions ............................................................................................................................. 55
Reflections on a Journey by ALTC Teaching Fellowship ................................................................................. 57
A Final Word ................................................................................................................................................................ 62
Appendix 1 – Survey of Industry .............................................................................................................................. 63
Appendix 2 – International Links ............................................................................................................................. 72
Appendix 3 – RPI E*ship Exemplars Points System ......................................................................................... 75
Appendix 4 – Reference Works Cited ..................................................................................................................... 78
Definitions
The terms ‘unit’, ‘subject’ and ‘course’ have different meanings in different international
contexts. Throughout this report, the term ‘subject’ is used to describe a self-contained block of
teaching (aka ‘unit’ at some institutions), usually of one semester length, whereas a ‘course’ is
used to describe the whole program of study that leads to award of a degree or diploma. In
Australia, undergraduate courses or degrees normally comprise six semesters spanning three
years with each semester composed of four ‘subjects’.
About the Author
Chris has spent over 30 years researching the molecular biology of
organisms as divergent as microalgae, bananas, marsupials, birds, fish
and fruit fly. During his years as a research scientist, Chris saw many
innovative discoveries progress no further than the laboratory bench.
In keeping with his disruptive innovation approach to science
research, Chris developed an entrepreneurship education program in
biotechnology that targeted graduates to the commercialisation and
technology transfer sector. The degree created a new career pathway
into the technology commercialisation infrastructure such that
graduates of the Bachelor of Biotechnology Innovation successfully
compete against PhDs with MBAs for jobs. In recognition of his
teaching leadership, Chris has received two university and three
national teaching awards and a prestigious Teaching Fellowship from
the Australian Teaching and Learning Council.
Acknowledgements
I will always be grateful to the Australian Learning and Teaching Council for providing me with
opportunities to learn and to experiment with curriculum that have enabled me to embark on a
journey; one which has yet to arrive at its destination.
Siobhan Lenihan requires a special mention for her encouragement, guidance and infinite
patience.
To my wife, Trudi, for the long periods away from home.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
3
Executive Summary
In the current era of global economic instability, business and industry have already identified a
widening gap between graduate skills and employability. An important element of this is the
lack of entrepreneurial skills in graduates. This Teaching Fellowship investigated two sides of a
story about entrepreneurial skills and their teaching. Senior players in the innovation
commercialisation industry, a high profile entrepreneurial sector, were surveyed to gauge their
needs and experiences of graduates they employ. International contexts of entrepreneurship
education were investigated to explore how their teaching programs impart the skills of
entrepreneurship. Such knowledge is an essential for the design of education programs that can
deliver the entrepreneurial skills deemed important by industry for future sustainability.
Two programs of entrepreneurship education are being implemented at QUT that draw on the
best practice exemplars investigated during this Fellowship. The QUT Innovation Space (QIS)
focuses on capturing the innovation and creativity of students, staff and others. The QIS is a
physical and virtual meeting and networking space; a connected community enhancing the
engagement of participants. The Q_Hatchery is still embryonic; but it is intended to be an
innovation community that brings together nascent entrepreneurial businesses to collaborate,
train and support each other. There is a niche between concept product and business incubator
where an experiential learning environment for otherwise isolated ‘garage-at-home’ businesses
could improve success rates. The QIS and the Q_Hatchery serve as living research laboratories
to trial the concepts emerging from the skills survey.
The survey of skills requirements of the innovation commercialisation industry has produced a
large and high quality data set still being explored. Work experience as an employability factor
has already emerged as an industry requirement that provides employee maturity. Exploratory
factor analysis of the skills topics surveyed has led to a process-based conceptual model for
teaching and learning higher-order entrepreneurial skills. Two foundational skills domains
(Knowledge, Awareness) are proposed as prerequisites which allow individuals with a suite of
early stage entrepreneurial and behavioural skills (Pre-leadership) to further leverage their
careers into a leadership role in industry with development of skills around higher order
elements of entrepreneurship, management in new business ventures and progressing winning
technologies to market. The next stage of the analysis is to test the proposed model through
structured equation modelling.
Another factor that emerged quickly from the survey analysis broadens the generic concept of
team skills currently voiced in Australian policy documents discussing the employability agenda.
While there was recognition of the role of sharing, creating and using knowledge in a team-
based interdisciplinary context, the adoption and adaptation of behaviours and attitudes of
other team members of different disciplinary backgrounds (interprofessionalism) featured as an
issue. Most undergraduates are taught and undertake teamwork in silos and, thus, seldom
experience a true real-world interdisciplinary environment.
Enhancing the entrepreneurial capacity of Australian industry is essential for the economic
health of the country and can only be achieved by addressing the lack of entrepreneurial skills in
graduates from the higher education system. This Fellowship has attempted to address this
deficiency by identifying the skills requirements and providing frameworks for their teaching.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
4
Introduction
The Research – Industry Nexus
While innovation creates intellectual capital (IP), it is the entrepreneurial process that drives the
commercialisation of innovation to the global marketplace. Globally, the funding of innovation
has focused predominantly on research, pure and applied; with little attention paid to the
commercialisation of research outcomes. Outside of the USA, a major criticism of funding of
research-industry partnerships recognises that the competing tensions of academic versus
industry imperatives often see the commercialisation potential of the nexus never fully realised.
Importantly, in Australia and elsewhere, the approaches and processes of commercialisation has
itself been bereft of innovation in the relationship between research institutes and industry
partners seeking to bring new discoveries to market.
In the USA, the relationship between industry and research is close and overlapping. The
blurring of academic and research boundaries is unique to this entrepreneurial culture where
the sheer volume of research and the investment mentality regarding new ventures foster the
“cluster” approach to creating, sharing and commercialising innovation.
Figure 1 – The relationship between industry and research in the USA is close and overlapping
In the Australian innovation ecology, research – industry partnerships are usually a linear
relationship and technology transfer offices traditionally sit between the industry partner and
the research institute. The latter are usually understaffed, not highly resourced and
conservative in nature and approach. Education, in this linear context, has traditionally been
seen as funding for higher degree research students.
Figure 2 – The linear relationship between industry and research in Australia
Prior to the Lisbon Accord of 2002
1
, the model of industry – research partnerships was the same
in the European Union (EU) as that in the Australian landscape. The European Commission (EC)
now recognises education as a third component to the industry – research partnership and
1
European Commission (2003) Green Paper: Entrepreneurship in Europe. European Commission, Brussels.
Industry
Research
Research Industry
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
5
defines a knowledge and innovation community (KIC) as a triple helix of interactions between
these three co-dependencies
2
. Calls for an increased education component of industry –
research partnerships were interpreted within the EU Framework Program 7, the major funding
scheme for innovation, as the training of higher degree research students and included support
schemes intended to increase mobility between member States.
Figure 3 – The European knowledge and innovation community model is a triple helix
In response to the continuing record of poor transition of innovation to marketplace, education
in the KIC has been redefined in recent years to encompass a major role for entrepreneurship
education. Consequently, the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) was
established to focus on improving the innovation to enterprise pipeline. The language that
features in EIT documentation is business-centred rather than discovery-focused. The EIT aims
to fund entrepreneurship education programs in higher education institutes as a pathway to
developing an entrepreneurial culture in the EC and securing an appropriately entrepreneurially
attuned and skilled workforce. The explicit aim of this targeted reconceptualisation of the role
of education is to accelerate innovations through the pipeline of commercialisation. The funding
of KICs by the EIT also heralds one other significant shift recognising that distributed research –
industry linkages and activities are not as commercially successful as those that are co-localised
in a community.
Why does Australia need entrepreneurship education?
The benefits of curricula that boost national entrepreneurial capacity and impart enterprising
skills have been noted in the academic literature, policy documents of governments’ worldwide
and reports from high-level think tanks (Organisation of Economic Cooperation and
Development
3
, the World Economic Forum
4
and the National Academy of Sciences (USA)
5
). The
need for entrepreneurship education is considered a given in this material. Over the last decade,
there has been substantial debate in the literature that the traditional didactic approach to
teaching entrepreneurship in business schools is disconnected from the process of innovation
2
European Commission (2006) Implementing the Community Lisbon Programme: Fostering entrepreneurial mindsets
through education and learning. European Commission, Brussels.
3
Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (2009) Evaluation of programmes concerning education for
entrepreneurship. Working Party on SMEs and Entrepreneurship, Organisation of Economic Cooperation and
Development, France.
4
World Economic Forum. (2009). Educating the next wave of entrepreneurs: Unlocking entrepreneurial capabilities to
meet the global challenges of the 21st Century, a report of the global education initiative. World Economic Forum,
Switzerland.
5
National Academy of Sciences (2007) Rising above the gathering storm: Energising and employing America for a
brighter economic future. National Academies Press, Washington.
Industry
Research
Education
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
6
itself
6
. The argument proceeds that traditional business degrees do not provide the skill sets
required to transform complex technological innovation into viable commercial products. A
2008 report on best practice published by the EC notes the real challenge is to develop fully
integrated entrepreneurship education programs outside of business schools
7
.
It is also becoming apparent that the divide between the content of educational training
programs and the emerging practices of taking innovation to enterprise is increasing as a
consequence of the rapid evolution of industry. While this may have been an issue restricted to
the new industries (such as digital media), it is now apparent more generally across business,
commerce and the manufacturing industry. In the 2011 policy document Skills for Prosperity
8
,
Skills Australia recognised the widening gap between the industry requirements around
employability and industry-readiness, and the training of graduates. The policy document
espouses the need for industry to be involved in the training process citing as a reason the rapid
evolution of business, commercial and industrial practices in the marketplace. The traditional
training providers, industry argues, are losing touch with the latest developments in business,
commerce and manufacturing. Nor are the processes of up-skilling the training providers
adequate. Although Skills Australia was referring specifically to the TAFE sector, the same adage
applies, perhaps doubly so, to the Australian university sector with its ageing workforce,
transition from non-professional degrees and focus on research as the primary measure of
prestige. Concepts where training and learning is ‘just-in-time’, ‘360-degree’, ‘action-oriented’
and within ‘connected communities’ involving the ‘learner-as-teacher’ are emerging as the
future paradigms of teaching in everyday industries now considered as fast-evolving.
In 1994, two doyens of entrepreneurship education, Karl Gartner and William Vesper, argued
the heart of entrepreneurship involves action, and that learning-by-doing is the most important
enabling tool in entrepreneurship education
9
. Similarly, successful entrepreneurs often learn by
doing (action-oriented) and as required (or just-in-time), learning only what is required from
those in the know and giving feedback (or 360-degree), and are characterised by developing
extensive interlaced networks of high value individuals (connected communities). Most
successful entrepreneurs move on to mentor budding entrepreneurs (learner-as-teacher).
It would seem that we are witnessing a collision between the age-old problems of delivering
efficacious and successful entrepreneurship education programs and the new-age issue of
delivering applicable and relevant general skills training in rapidly evolving industries. This
convergence is not surprising as industry recognises the skills underlying entrepreneurship (i.e.,
the enterprising skills of risk-taking, opportunity recognition, action-orientation, drive to
succeed) as important for future business sustainability through innovation that is both
systemic and disruptive
10
.
6
Gibb A (2002) In pursuit of a new ‘enterprise’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ paradigm for learning: creative destruction, new
values, new ways of doing things and new combinations of knowledge. International Journal of Management Reviews
4(3): 233-269.
7
European Commission (2008) Best procedure project: “Entrepreneurship in higher education, especially in non-
business studies”. Final report of the Expert Group. European Commission, Brussels.
8
Skills Australia (2011) Skills for prosperity: A roadmap for vocational education and training. Government of
Australia.
9
Garter WB, Vesper KH (1994) Experiments in entrepreneurship education: Successes and failures. Journal of Business
Venturing 9(3): 179-187.
10
Christensen CM (1997) The innovator’s dilemma. Harvard Business School Press, Boston.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
7
Why this Fellowship?
The innovation and entrepreneurial skills that underpin the innovation commercialisation
sector highlight the emerging skills requirements of Australian industry. This ALTC Teaching
Fellowship looks to investigate entrepreneurial or enterprising skills in the Australian
innovation commercialisation industry and how these skills are taught in international contexts
of entrepreneurship education. This knowledge is essential for the driving the design of
education programs in the Australian higher education sector that will deliver the
entrepreneurial skills required for the employability of graduates and the future vitality of
Australian industry.
Program Aims and Approaches
This ALTC Fellowship has sought to listen to and assess both sides of a story about innovation
commercialisation skills. From those at the heart of the Australian innovation
commercialisation industry in order to gauge their needs, their expectations and their
experiences with the graduates they employ. The other side of the story explores the point of
view of those who develop innovative teaching and learning programs globally that target the
skills of entrepreneurship.
The goal of the Fellowship is to enhance the understanding and appreciation of skills
requirements of the innovation commercialisation sector and to begin to develop programs of
entrepreneurship education (or education in enterprising behaviours and skills) in the
Australian higher education sector that impart the requisite skills. The end purpose is to
incorporate the findings into education programs at tertiary level that:
• Provide avenues for students to learn the required skill sets;
• Improve the employability of graduates; and
• Increase the entrepreneurial capacity of Australian business.
Aims
This ALTC Fellowship encompassed three specific aims that determined the approach to
activities (below):
1. Determine the desirable skill sets for employability in the Australian innovation
commercialisation sector;
2. Examine and distil best practice procedures from targeted international contexts, and
3. Develop resources to enable best practice exemplars of education in innovation and
entrepreneurship to be embedded in the Australian higher education curriculum.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
8
Approach to Activities
Aim 1: Skills for Innovation Commercialisation
Stated Aim: Determine the desirable skill sets for employability in the innovation
commercialisation sector.
Considered Approach: A survey of Australian innovation commercialisation organisations was
undertaken to examine the skills requirements of the organisation and the perceived skills
deficiencies in recently employed graduates.
Derivation of Questionnaire
An early restriction was placed on survey coverage. Innovation commercialisation is a complex
pipeline process that begins at one end of the spectrum with ideation, creativity and innovation
and finishes at the other end with a product in the marketplace. Ideation, creativity and
innovation are not phenomena irrevocably linked to entrepreneurship; ideation, creativity and
innovation can occur in isolation while the entrepreneurship often feeds off them. It is
entrepreneurship that occupies the pipeline between extremes and thus this survey is not
concerned with innovation itself but the skills needed to commercialise the innovation.
All commercialisation pipelines require technical, generic and enterprising skills; the survey
aimed to evaluate the importance of the particular skill set requirements in the industry and the
apparent skills gap between the level required by industry requirements and that evident in
graduates entering the industry. A guiding principle of the questionnaire design was flexibility
to permit administration to both the core commercialisation industry as well as support
industries such as venture capital firms, start-up companies, new venture divisions of large
firms, government agencies, legal firms and research organisations.
Iterative rounds of searches of the extant literature and internet across a wide breadth of
disciplines were used to derive a list of core skills that covered the three recognised domains of
technical, generic and enterprising (or entrepreneurial) skills. Web-based sources of skills lists
included the generic and specific competences (e.g., business, sciences) of the EU Tuning
Project
11
. The graduate capabilities list of QUT
12
, which is essentially no different to that of most
universities, was also partitioned into individual skill traits and included in the core skills list.
Particular facets of the skill itself, its application and the degree of overlap with other skills
confound phrasing of the topics/questions around appropriateness of skills in the workplace.
Certain skills can be addressed easily. The core entrepreneurial skills of risk taking, opportunity
recognition and drive for success can be considered from a one-dimensional standpoint. On the
other hand, the generic reference to team skills, which appears in the list of desired graduate
capabilities of every tertiary institute on the globe, is more complex a trait when measuring
success of graduates in an innovation commercialisation context. Particular attributes of team
skills are of importance in driving a concept through product development. From a simple
11
http://www.unideusto.org/tuningeu
12
http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/C/C_04_03.jsp
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
9
viewpoint, all team members must have an awareness of roles and responsibilities whatever the
team composition. On the other hand, the term working collaboratively has different
implications in teams of like-minded and like-tasked individuals versus multidisciplinary teams
where knowledge, skills and behaviours must be shared. In the latter case, the application of
team skills also addresses interdisciplinarity and interprofessionalism. In terms of application,
the manifestation of, or the requirement for, the skill spans a spectrum through various levels of
knowledge (awareness, competency, deep), to the synthesis of knowledge
(equivocal/unequivocal; understanding/appreciation) and the ability to apply that knowledge
synthesis to familiar and unfamiliar situations.
Approximately 35 core skills were analysed through facilitated interpretative discourse that
considered the various elements of overlapping intent of broad scope coverage and the myriad
multidimensional facets that each implied in the innovation commercialisation context.
Approximately 200 skill topics were derived centred on the manifestation of, or the requirement
for, elements of the core skill. Subsequent rounds of facilitated discourse undertook reiterative
differential categorisation, prioritisation and construct validation to realise 61 topics.
The final survey comprised 74 primary questions or topics grouped into eight categories (see
Appendix 1). The first category consisted of seven questions that addressed demographics of
the respondent’s organisation. The second category (credentialism) comprised six questions
that sought to ascertain the credentials of the respondent and recently employed personnel, and
to ascertain the utility of the respondent’s credentials in the decision-making processes of the
organisation. The latter topic emerged as an issue when looking at barriers to graduate entry
into the commercialisation infrastructure made evident to the Fellow as part of the outcomes
associated with QUT’s Bachelor of Biotechnology Innovation
13
.
The third category comprised the remaining 61 primary topics that addressed a particular
graduate skill (including behaviour or attitude) or its application, with each topic included two
questions:
• How important (IMP) are each of the following skills to your organisation?
• How evident (EVD) are each of these skills in the graduates you employ?
Topics within the six categories assessing graduate skill levels were distributed as follows:
• Entrepreneurial skills (15),
• Generic skills (11),
• Knowledge (4),
• Information management (6),
• Individual performance (5),
• Practice-focused skills (9) (disciplinary, interdisciplinarity and interprofessionalism),
and
• A miscellaneous collection (11) including stand-alone questions or questions with
considerable overlap between other nominated categories.
The questionnaire design included a Likert 5-point scale
14
with no neutral point to avoid
courtesy bias on the part of respondents and eliminate ambivalence as a common contributory
factor to surveys where questions relate to attitudes or preferences.
13
Collet C (2012) Bioneering ten years on: lessons from teaching biotechnology entrepreneurship at the undergraduate
level. International Journal of Innovation in Science and Mathematics Education, in press.
14
Dawes J (2002) Five point vs eleven point scales: Does it make a difference to data characteristics? Australasian
Journal of Market Research 10 (1): 39 – 47.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
10
Survey Procedure
The names of target organisations, their contact details and appropriate personnel, were
collected through internet searches of government and private directories of research,
development and commercialisation organisations and through searches using phrases such as
‘technology transfer’, ‘research commercialisation’, ‘technology commercialisation’, ‘venture
capital’, ‘intellectual property’ and variations thereof. For example, government directories
provided lists of Cooperative Research Centres, Centres of Excellence, research institutions and
technology transfer offices. In the case of large organisations, such as Divisions of CSIRO,
universities and research institutes, individual web sites were searched for the appropriate
contact point. Including discipline names in text the string (e.g. ‘creative industries’,
‘multimedia’, ‘information technology’, ‘biotechnology’) also extended the search scope. The
large number of results returned made this approach inherently difficult to apply and routinely
failed to reveal any additional potential survey respondents. By definition, the organisations
targeted are adjuncts to knowledge-intensive innovation industries and thus may not be
representative of the commercialisation pipeline but rather representative of the innovation
commercialisation pipeline.
As the industry in Australia is small, it was decided to undertake the survey by telephone
interview to improve response rates. The Institute of Social Science Research (The University of
Queensland) conducted telephone interviews during February 2011, and the survey achieved
207 responses from a list of 452 possible respondents (= response rate of 45 %).
Analysis of Results
Rather than testing theory, the survey was designed as an exploratory exercise with the aim of
building theory. The dataset generated by the survey is large and complex; analysis and
interpretation are still being undertaken. Survey data manipulation and statistical analyses
utilises the SPSS package of data to process and manipulate the survey data. A stepwise
progression methodology is being followed with the data transformation and interpretation as
follows: (1) an identification of the items (skills) of importance to the innovation
commercialisation industry using Pearson’s chi-squared tests for independence between IMP
and EVD, (2) classification of the items into constructs (skill fields) using exploratory factor
analysis to search for influencing variables with internal consistency of construct validity
examined using Cronbach’s alpha test, and (3) a search for causality using regression analysis
and structured equation modelling. As the analysis is exploratory, reiterative rounds of data and
outcomes assessment are being undertaken through discourse and reflection, with concomitant
refinements to methodological approaches, in progressing through initial stages of examining
the large data set.
Aim 2: Best Practice Exemplars of Entrepreneurship Education
Stated Aim: Examine and distil best practice procedures from targeted international contexts.
Considered Approach: Best practice exemplars were identified through literature and internet
searches. Australian exemplars were very restricted in number and have not been examined in
this survey. The QUT exemplars routinely sit atop the internet search results.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
11
Selection of International Exemplars
Reiterative internet searches were conducted with the search terms: ‘education’, ‘student’,
‘entrepreneurship’, ‘innovation’, ‘creativity’, ‘laboratory’, ‘space’, ‘enterprising skills’, ‘technology
commercialisation’ and combinations thereof. Although, education programs in higher
education contexts were a primary focus, results indicating entrepreneurship education in other
organisation contexts were also screened across the first 100 hits returned for any combination
of search terms. The organisation contexts outside of higher education institutes provided
mostly reports of programs provided through educational institutes, including higher education,
or initiatives of regional development offices of governments and councils.
For the European context, a number of European Commission reports provided a base line for
collecting information on various entrepreneurship education programs. The most influential of
these reports which informed the case study visits is the March 2008 report from the EC
Enterprise and Industry Directorate-General entitled ‘Best procedure project: Entrepreneurship
in higher education, especially in non-business studies’
15
. Across the European Union, the
contexts of entrepreneurship programs appeared more diverse in nature and more recent in
introduction.
For the USA context, internet search results revealed a more uniform approach to
entrepreneurship education programs with two modes of delivery predominant. In the
curriculum space, business schools deliver undergraduate and master’s entrepreneurship
programs with a strong theoretical content. Each year, The Princeton Review publishes a ranking
of the entrepreneurship education programs, undergraduate and graduate, based on a review of
the offerings of 2000 higher education institutes. The top 25 programs in either category
emanate from business schools or colleges. The second mode of delivery or activity often found
is the extracurricular business plan competition. Many of these competitions have been in
operation for some time (> 10 years). Most were not accompanied by any apparent training
process; instead appearing to rely on the innate entrepreneurial ability of the competitors to
provide a differentiating factor. Nonetheless, over the last three years, a number of initiatives
have been implemented which provide a less ‘cookie-cutter’ approach to instilling
entrepreneurial intent in students.
Literature searches were also carried out using the Web of Knowledge database, primarily,
Scopus and other databases available through QUT Library. Direct literature searches provided
fewer pointers than internet searches to active education programs that could be evaluated for
content and context. Where literature searches pointed to programs of interest, such programs
had already been found using the reiterative internet search routines.
Several guiding principles were used to inform the selection process. An over-riding factor in
selection was the context of the program; learning by doing and action orientation outside of
business schools was the initial criterion. Apparent size and scope of the program were
influencing factors as well as the advertised outcomes of the program. Other factors were also
deemed important. The aim of the Fellowship is to create materials that facilitate introduction
of entrepreneurship education in the Australian higher education sector where there is a dearth
of such programs. Factors such the apparent ease of program implementation, a diversity of
delivery modes, the level of staff involved and university support, sustainability and
transferability were also considered.
15
European Commission (2008) Op cit.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
12
Implicit in the selection process was an assumption that the programs contain a regime
designed to deliver training in a suite of ‘entrepreneurial’ skills in an environment of innovation
and creativity in higher education.
Aim 3: Resource Development for Entrepreneurship Education
Stated Aim: Develop resources to enable best practice exemplars of education in innovation and
entrepreneurship to be embedded in the Australian higher education curriculum.
Considered Approach: This aspect of the Fellowship aims to bring together the two major study
components: industry expectations and higher education curriculum. To provide a resource of
examples of programs, the different models of entrepreneurship education programs are being
developed into reports that highlight their educational approaches, context, organisational
structure, resource requirements and offerings. As there is an overall dearth of
entrepreneurship education programs in Australia, this resource should provide a “starting
point” for educators interested in following this avenue of teaching and scholarship. The
research collected has also been used to develop a number of entrepreneurship education
programs that are being implemented at QUT. These programs are serving as the testing
grounds for establishing the parameters, conditions and responses to implementing
entrepreneurship education programs in the Australian context.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
13
Skills for Innovation Commercialisation
Innovation has long been recognised as a key driver of economic growth and prosperity.
Increased global competition over the last twenty years arising from both the emergence of the
mega-economies of China and India, and emerging economies in South America, Asia and Africa,
has focused the attention of world governments, particularly in developed countries, on the
need to revitalise and stimulate economies. Industry and government awareness has been
accompanied by increased policy documents and initiatives aimed at stimulating innovation. A
deeper understanding of the issues at hand point to the need not only to innovate; but also to
commercialise and disseminate those innovations. With a heightened economic imperative
focused on innovation, the diverse industry that is innovation commercialisation has become a
high profile high technology sector with significant influence, impact and leverage. By
definition, and in contrast to the commercialisation process, innovation commercialisation is an
industry highly dependent on technical knowledge and skills coupled with a well-developed
applied and experiential framework to drive successful outcomes. Consequently, credentialed
individuals who build successful careers based on a learning-by-doing approach populate the
industry.
Diversity in the industry arises as the commercialisation of innovation is a very context specific
process; highly dependent upon the nature of the grounding discipline (or inter-discipline). For
example, the technological scope, the long gestation period in research and development (12 –
15 years) and huge financial commitment (upwards of US$1 bn) to bring an innovation such as a
novel therapeutic to market contrasts the relatively short timespan (< 18 months) and modest
investment (< $300,000) that can accompany a new application for a smartphone. The former
requires a larger, highly regulated, compliance-oriented pipeline process involving the
contributions of scientific inventors, mathematicians, chemists, technicians, product developers,
business people, venture financiers, lawyers, and an increasing number of clinical trials
specialists. Each is involved in leveraging their product onto a global marketplace through
alliances and partnerships with multinational pharmaceutical companies. In this instance, no
one person may manage the commercialisation pipeline from start to finish and the inventor is
likely to be divorced (voluntarily or involuntarily) from the process during the early phases of
the venture. The inventor of a software application is in a position to manage the product
development and commercialisation processes with a small team that can distribute the product
globally through a simpler framework relatively free from regulation and compliance issues.
Whatever the technological focus of the player, success in the industry is dependent not just on
the inherent novelty and utility of the innovation but on the ability to sell the innovation in a
market populated with competing technologies or services.
This phase of the study is being undertaken in conjunction with Associate Professor Damian
Hine of the UQ Business School. Dr Hine and I designed a survey instrument that could capture
the expectations of those in the innovation commercialisation industry and contrast that with
the experience they have had with graduates they have employed. The survey was conducted in
early 2011, and 207 useable responses were gained from mostly senior managers in
organisations dedicated to innovation commercialisation. Application of the statistical analysis
is being undertaken by Karen du Plessis, while analysis and interpretation of the survey data,
inclusive of reiterative rounds of discourse and reflection, are being undertaken in conjunction
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
14
with Associate Professor Hine. This report offers an initial assessment of the data emanating
form the survey.
Respondent characteristics
Electing to use a professional telephone survey organisation, the Institute of Social Science
Research, resulted in an excellent response rate of 45 % providing a data set of high quality. The
survey realised 207 responses from industry personnel with 94.2 % of respondents
representing management: middle (25.1 %) and upper level (senior manager: 36.7 %; CEO 32.4
%). Four sectors dominated the industry groups making up 88% of the respondents: health and
community services (20 %), property and business services (20 %), agriculture, forestry and
fishing (22 %) and a miscellaneous group (various) (26 %). Mining, manufacturing, government
administration and defence, utilities and communication services were all at or below 4 %. The
sector representation reflects the non-random sampling approach to target selection with a
focus on those organisations whose brief it is to commercialise innovations. There are some
accepted limitations to this technique; namely the problem of overlooking types of
organisations, especially small-to-medium enterprises. The majority (70 %) of industry
organisations were under 40 years of age with 55 % less than 20 years old and over half of the
organisations employed up to 100 employees and almost all had less than 2000 employees. As
one would expect, the geographic focus of the organisations was predominantly international
(49.8 %) or national (39.6 %) while those with a regional (8.2 %) or local (2.4 %) focus were in a
distinct minority.
Credentialism
The survey respondents represent a highly credentialed population of individuals: 42% had a
highest qualification of a PhD, 23.5 % had a master’s degree and 34 % graduated with a
bachelor’s degree (including Honours).
Of the employees hired by the organisations in the last three years, the majority (83.8 %) of
employees were recent graduates (37.3 %) or had graduated less than a year beforehand (14.1
%) or were previously employed graduates (32.4 %). Non-graduates accounted for 16.2 % of
recent employees. As noted above, highly credentialed individuals populate the innovation
commercialisation industry. A large percentage of graduates employed had the higher-level
qualifications of master’s degree (12.9) or PhD (31.6) and almost 42 % of employed graduates
have at least a bachelor’s degree. The high proportion of graduates with post-bachelor’s degrees
(44.5 %) supports the notion of an industry requirement for advanced knowledge and skills
base.
Figure 4 – Per cent qualifications of
employees in the innovation
commercialisation industry. Degree
abbreviations: Bach = bachelor; PhD = Doctor
of Philosophy; MBA = Master of Business
Administration.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
15
When hiring graduates, industry respondents placed more weight on the importance of
technical knowledge (56 %) than that of generic skills (e.g. communication, team work) at 44 %.
Nonetheless, the distribution suggests that both technical knowledge/skills and a command of
the soft skills are considered important by management in determining the employability of
graduates in the innovation commercialisation context. The high demand for soft skills reflects
the nature of the innovation commercialisation industry where the success of players, and hence
their employer organisation, is dependent on cultivating relationships to licence or sell the
innovation to larger players in their sector, to form alliances with partner organisations and in
securing both R&D and distribution networks in a landscape of heavily competing technologies.
Although the commercialisation industry values the qualifications of the credentialed graduate
(56 %), work experience is recognised as an important component of employability at 44 %.
Work experience provides a contextualisation and relevance factor that is not otherwise
achieved in a degree course setting; i.e. recent
graduates are not usually industry-ready despite the
fact that many programs have introduced some form
of internship or industry placement in recent years.
Managers see that work experience provides
employee maturity, honing awareness of the
commercial imperative. In this regard, the high
demand for a level of work experience is reflected
in the gap analysis on the scaled questions (see
below), which highlights the perception that
graduates may be equipped theoretically for the
workforce but lack an experiential base that affects workplace decisions and activities impacting
on business success. Employers regard this ‘blooding’ of new employees in the real world
imperative as requisite training and the importance placed on experience is further reflected in
the responses to the question relating to the decision-making processes. What the observed
response distribution may also highlight are additional, possibly combinatorial, attitudinal
factors such as: (1) unwillingness on the part of this particular industry to engage in the early
training experience of the recent graduate, and (2) a failure of university courses to adequately
develop industry-ready graduates for employability in this sector. This may also be a hangover
of an Australian industrial landscape in which traditionally commercial entities focus on
production and distribution and leave the innovation to “others” such as universities, CSIRO,
hospitals, other government agencies and backyard inventors.
From the Fellow’s perspective, this demand for work experience as a component of graduate
employability may also underscore the success witnessed in the graduate outcomes of the QUT
Bachelor of Biotechnology Innovation when compared with graduates of the business –
biotechnology double degree
16
. The former comprises a substantive (one entire semester)
industry-based business development project around initial concept ideas which serves as
work-related experience whereas the latter lacks any directed high level work experience.
16
Collet C & Wyatt D (2005) Bioneering – teaching biotechnology entrepreneurship at the undergraduate level.
Education +Training 47(6): 408-421.
Figure 5 – Relative contribution of
qualifications versus experience considered
appropriate when hiring a graduate
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
16
The value of the experiential framework alters over
time and takes a prominent role in the decision-
making processes of management in an innovation
commercialisation context. Although a highly
credentialed population, the qualifications of the
respondents are not the most significant contributing
factor in decision-making activities (at only 27 %);
rather work-acquired experience provides the most
important component of business success (73 %).
This suggests that businesses decisions are
informed predominantly by previous experiences:
successes and failures and the learning that occurs as a result of these experiences.
These results highlight an interesting dichotomy between the relative contributions of higher-
level technical qualifications and work-acquired experience in plotting a commercialisation
pathway for an innovation. Evidence suggests the value of in-depth technical knowledge is
supplanted quickly as disciplines evolve and merge, and the importance of understanding the
complex technical aspects that are emphasised in higher degree qualifications is of little
relevance. Thus, in innovation commercialisation, there appears to be a requirement for a
threshold qualification as distinct from its actual use.
Collet (2012)
17
highlights the opposing attitudes that exist in the biotechnology industry
regarding the employment suitability of graduates of a blended undergraduate degree that
targets the bio-innovation commercialisation infrastructure. The employer target market of
biotechnology commercialisation is dynamic and high profile where players bring together
components of the commercialisation pipeline process. Players are usually highly credentialed
with a PhD and an MBA. Industry sector success is dependent on selling the innovation; usually
amongst competing technologies. A minority in the biotechnology industry maintain that the
course does not satisfy industry requirements citing the lack of depth in the technical discipline
and an understanding of the scientific process that can only come from a PhD degree. This
recurring message delivered at networking events impacts negatively on student attitudes and
arises from a misunderstanding of course intent, which is to create business development
associates whereas industry elements regard graduates as potential business development
managers. Other biotechnology industry players argue that the ‘must have PhD’ mentality is a
reflection on the credentialed pathway that the individual player took to arrive in the sector.
Senior players in the sector argue that the most valuable tools in the decision-making process
are work experience and the ability to learn the relevant disciplinary knowledge quickly. As
innovations derive from interdisciplinary areas, the emphasis shifts from an in-depth knowledge
of one area to an ability to learn and synthesise knowledge from an array of different sources (a
desired graduate capability!).
Prior to this survey, anecdotal evidence collected by the Fellow suggested that the debate over
qualifications versus experience was specific to the biotechnology commercialisation sector and
some other science disciplines, such as chemistry and physics. Furthermore, the evidence
suggested that such attitudes were not apparent in the technology-focused disciplines of
engineering and information technology; nor were they apparent in the creative industries.
First pass analysis of the data obtained in this study suggests that the must-have attitude
regarding credentials may be more widespread amongst professional fields and industry
sectors. Certainly, this dichotomy between requirement for a higher credential versus its
17
Collet C (2012) Op cit.
Figure 6 – The relative contribution of
qualifications versus experience in decision-
making activities
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
17
applicability in on going business actions both needs to be explored in a survey that targets a
broader array of industries and contexts and represents a worthy future investigation.
Graduate Skills
At the simplest level, the survey sought to ascertain the perceived importance (IMP) of graduate
skills in the innovation commercialisation industry from the viewpoint of the employer and to
also contrast the perception that the employer group has of the skills level evident (EVD) in
graduate employees. However, these variables are not necessarily independent. From the
viewpoint of the respondent, the relative importance of any one skill in business activity is
evaluated in comparison to a suite of other skills. The respondent is explicitly aware of this
process of the survey. In questionnaires of this nature, it is not unusual for respondents to rate
the importance of a variable highly as well as rate their own levels of attainment higher than
they perceive as evident in others. While an overall ranking reveals broad trends in the IMP
response (see Appendix 1) pointing to skills perceived to be of higher importance than others,
the high standard deviation values make simplistic analysis meaningless. For each of the 61
questions, the IMPmean response was higher than the EVDmean (average means: IMP = 3.6: EVD =
2.78). The results overwhelmingly suggest a substantial gap exists between the skills
considered essential for industry activity/success and those evident in recent graduates.
In reviewing graduate skills levels, the respondent is not engaged in a comparative ranking of
the skills in graduates; the person is explicitly providing a value judgement about a perceived
distance measure (deficiency) that implicitly provides an independent measure of the
importance of the skill in the respondent’s activities. For this reason, it is the distance between
the means of IMP and EVD that provides meaningful measures of skills importance (ie, IMPmean
minus EVDmean as a variable in itself).
It is important to reiterate that the design of the survey was both to explore industry perception
and to further build on pre-existing theory; therefore, an integral part of the stepwise
progression methodology is reiterative discourse and reflection regarding the meanings of the
derived constructs and then deriving appropriate next steps in data analysis and construct
classification and definition.
A Pearson chi-squared analysis was applied to test for independence between the IMPmean and
EVDmean variable for each question. Of the 61 comparisons, only four showed no significant
measure of independence (ability to recognise an opportunity, ability to negotiate, effective
written communication skills, ability to apply knowledge in practice). These four item variables
were discarded from further analyses. Two comparisons were significant at the p
During this such a brief breakdown related to entrepreneurship education in non business schools.
Final Report 2011
Entrepreneurship Education in
Non-Business Schools
Best practice for Australian contexts of
knowledge and innovation communities
Chris Collet
ALTC Teaching Fellow
Support for this Fellowship was provided by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council Ltd.,
which is an initiative of the Australian Government. The views expressed in this report do not
necessarily reflect the views of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council or the Australian
Government.
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2011
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Table of Contents
Definitions ............................................................................................................................................................................ 2
About the Author ............................................................................................................................................................... 2
Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................................................... 2
Executive Summary ......................................................................................................................................................... 3
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................................ 4
The Research – Industry Nexus .............................................................................................................................. 4
Why does Australia need entrepreneurship education? ............................................................................. 5
Why this Fellowship?.................................................................................................................................................. 7
Program Aims and Approaches................................................................................................................................... 7
Aims ................................................................................................................................................................................... 7
Approach to Activities ................................................................................................................................................ 8
Aim 1: Skills for Innovation Commercialisation ......................................................................................... 8
Aim 2: Best Practice Exemplars of Entrepreneurship Education ...................................................... 10
Aim 3: Resource Development for Entrepreneurship Education ...................................................... 12
Skills for Innovation Commercialisation ............................................................................................................... 13
Respondent characteristics .................................................................................................................................... 14
Credentialism ............................................................................................................................................................... 14
Graduate Skills ............................................................................................................................................................. 17
A Model ........................................................................................................................................................................... 20
Vignettes of Best Practice ............................................................................................................................................ 23
Masters by Research ................................................................................................................................................. 24
The TEC Program – North Carolina State University .................................................................................. 26
Center for Student Innovation – Rochester Institute of Technology .................................................... 28
E*ntrepreneurship at Rensselaer – Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ................................................. 30
IDEA – Northeastern University .......................................................................................................................... 32
Innovation Space – Arizona State University ................................................................................................. 34
Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship ............................................................................................................ 36
Maison de l’Entrepreneuriat – Université de Grenoble .............................................................................. 39
Center für Innovation and Entrepreneurship – Karlsruhe Institute of Technology ....................... 40
Charity Entrepreneurship – Dublin Institute of Technology ................................................................... 41
The Hothouse – Dublin Institute of Technology ............................................................................................ 43
Fellowship Outcomes @ QUT ..................................................................................................................................... 44
The QUT Innovation Space ..................................................................................................................................... 46
History ....................................................................................................................................................................... 46
The QIS Explained (Advertising material) .................................................................................................. 47
Current QIS Activities .......................................................................................................................................... 49
The Q_Hatchery ........................................................................................................................................................... 51
The Q_Hatchery Explained (Advertising material) ................................................................................. 51
Current (proto-) Q_Hatchery Status .............................................................................................................. 53
University-Wide Competitions ............................................................................................................................. 55
Reflections on a Journey by ALTC Teaching Fellowship ................................................................................. 57
A Final Word ................................................................................................................................................................ 62
Appendix 1 – Survey of Industry .............................................................................................................................. 63
Appendix 2 – International Links ............................................................................................................................. 72
Appendix 3 – RPI E*ship Exemplars Points System ......................................................................................... 75
Appendix 4 – Reference Works Cited ..................................................................................................................... 78
Definitions
The terms ‘unit’, ‘subject’ and ‘course’ have different meanings in different international
contexts. Throughout this report, the term ‘subject’ is used to describe a self-contained block of
teaching (aka ‘unit’ at some institutions), usually of one semester length, whereas a ‘course’ is
used to describe the whole program of study that leads to award of a degree or diploma. In
Australia, undergraduate courses or degrees normally comprise six semesters spanning three
years with each semester composed of four ‘subjects’.
About the Author
Chris has spent over 30 years researching the molecular biology of
organisms as divergent as microalgae, bananas, marsupials, birds, fish
and fruit fly. During his years as a research scientist, Chris saw many
innovative discoveries progress no further than the laboratory bench.
In keeping with his disruptive innovation approach to science
research, Chris developed an entrepreneurship education program in
biotechnology that targeted graduates to the commercialisation and
technology transfer sector. The degree created a new career pathway
into the technology commercialisation infrastructure such that
graduates of the Bachelor of Biotechnology Innovation successfully
compete against PhDs with MBAs for jobs. In recognition of his
teaching leadership, Chris has received two university and three
national teaching awards and a prestigious Teaching Fellowship from
the Australian Teaching and Learning Council.
Acknowledgements
I will always be grateful to the Australian Learning and Teaching Council for providing me with
opportunities to learn and to experiment with curriculum that have enabled me to embark on a
journey; one which has yet to arrive at its destination.
Siobhan Lenihan requires a special mention for her encouragement, guidance and infinite
patience.
To my wife, Trudi, for the long periods away from home.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
3
Executive Summary
In the current era of global economic instability, business and industry have already identified a
widening gap between graduate skills and employability. An important element of this is the
lack of entrepreneurial skills in graduates. This Teaching Fellowship investigated two sides of a
story about entrepreneurial skills and their teaching. Senior players in the innovation
commercialisation industry, a high profile entrepreneurial sector, were surveyed to gauge their
needs and experiences of graduates they employ. International contexts of entrepreneurship
education were investigated to explore how their teaching programs impart the skills of
entrepreneurship. Such knowledge is an essential for the design of education programs that can
deliver the entrepreneurial skills deemed important by industry for future sustainability.
Two programs of entrepreneurship education are being implemented at QUT that draw on the
best practice exemplars investigated during this Fellowship. The QUT Innovation Space (QIS)
focuses on capturing the innovation and creativity of students, staff and others. The QIS is a
physical and virtual meeting and networking space; a connected community enhancing the
engagement of participants. The Q_Hatchery is still embryonic; but it is intended to be an
innovation community that brings together nascent entrepreneurial businesses to collaborate,
train and support each other. There is a niche between concept product and business incubator
where an experiential learning environment for otherwise isolated ‘garage-at-home’ businesses
could improve success rates. The QIS and the Q_Hatchery serve as living research laboratories
to trial the concepts emerging from the skills survey.
The survey of skills requirements of the innovation commercialisation industry has produced a
large and high quality data set still being explored. Work experience as an employability factor
has already emerged as an industry requirement that provides employee maturity. Exploratory
factor analysis of the skills topics surveyed has led to a process-based conceptual model for
teaching and learning higher-order entrepreneurial skills. Two foundational skills domains
(Knowledge, Awareness) are proposed as prerequisites which allow individuals with a suite of
early stage entrepreneurial and behavioural skills (Pre-leadership) to further leverage their
careers into a leadership role in industry with development of skills around higher order
elements of entrepreneurship, management in new business ventures and progressing winning
technologies to market. The next stage of the analysis is to test the proposed model through
structured equation modelling.
Another factor that emerged quickly from the survey analysis broadens the generic concept of
team skills currently voiced in Australian policy documents discussing the employability agenda.
While there was recognition of the role of sharing, creating and using knowledge in a team-
based interdisciplinary context, the adoption and adaptation of behaviours and attitudes of
other team members of different disciplinary backgrounds (interprofessionalism) featured as an
issue. Most undergraduates are taught and undertake teamwork in silos and, thus, seldom
experience a true real-world interdisciplinary environment.
Enhancing the entrepreneurial capacity of Australian industry is essential for the economic
health of the country and can only be achieved by addressing the lack of entrepreneurial skills in
graduates from the higher education system. This Fellowship has attempted to address this
deficiency by identifying the skills requirements and providing frameworks for their teaching.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
4
Introduction
The Research – Industry Nexus
While innovation creates intellectual capital (IP), it is the entrepreneurial process that drives the
commercialisation of innovation to the global marketplace. Globally, the funding of innovation
has focused predominantly on research, pure and applied; with little attention paid to the
commercialisation of research outcomes. Outside of the USA, a major criticism of funding of
research-industry partnerships recognises that the competing tensions of academic versus
industry imperatives often see the commercialisation potential of the nexus never fully realised.
Importantly, in Australia and elsewhere, the approaches and processes of commercialisation has
itself been bereft of innovation in the relationship between research institutes and industry
partners seeking to bring new discoveries to market.
In the USA, the relationship between industry and research is close and overlapping. The
blurring of academic and research boundaries is unique to this entrepreneurial culture where
the sheer volume of research and the investment mentality regarding new ventures foster the
“cluster” approach to creating, sharing and commercialising innovation.
Figure 1 – The relationship between industry and research in the USA is close and overlapping
In the Australian innovation ecology, research – industry partnerships are usually a linear
relationship and technology transfer offices traditionally sit between the industry partner and
the research institute. The latter are usually understaffed, not highly resourced and
conservative in nature and approach. Education, in this linear context, has traditionally been
seen as funding for higher degree research students.
Figure 2 – The linear relationship between industry and research in Australia
Prior to the Lisbon Accord of 2002
1
, the model of industry – research partnerships was the same
in the European Union (EU) as that in the Australian landscape. The European Commission (EC)
now recognises education as a third component to the industry – research partnership and
1
European Commission (2003) Green Paper: Entrepreneurship in Europe. European Commission, Brussels.
Industry
Research
Research Industry
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
5
defines a knowledge and innovation community (KIC) as a triple helix of interactions between
these three co-dependencies
2
. Calls for an increased education component of industry –
research partnerships were interpreted within the EU Framework Program 7, the major funding
scheme for innovation, as the training of higher degree research students and included support
schemes intended to increase mobility between member States.
Figure 3 – The European knowledge and innovation community model is a triple helix
In response to the continuing record of poor transition of innovation to marketplace, education
in the KIC has been redefined in recent years to encompass a major role for entrepreneurship
education. Consequently, the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) was
established to focus on improving the innovation to enterprise pipeline. The language that
features in EIT documentation is business-centred rather than discovery-focused. The EIT aims
to fund entrepreneurship education programs in higher education institutes as a pathway to
developing an entrepreneurial culture in the EC and securing an appropriately entrepreneurially
attuned and skilled workforce. The explicit aim of this targeted reconceptualisation of the role
of education is to accelerate innovations through the pipeline of commercialisation. The funding
of KICs by the EIT also heralds one other significant shift recognising that distributed research –
industry linkages and activities are not as commercially successful as those that are co-localised
in a community.
Why does Australia need entrepreneurship education?
The benefits of curricula that boost national entrepreneurial capacity and impart enterprising
skills have been noted in the academic literature, policy documents of governments’ worldwide
and reports from high-level think tanks (Organisation of Economic Cooperation and
Development
3
, the World Economic Forum
4
and the National Academy of Sciences (USA)
5
). The
need for entrepreneurship education is considered a given in this material. Over the last decade,
there has been substantial debate in the literature that the traditional didactic approach to
teaching entrepreneurship in business schools is disconnected from the process of innovation
2
European Commission (2006) Implementing the Community Lisbon Programme: Fostering entrepreneurial mindsets
through education and learning. European Commission, Brussels.
3
Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (2009) Evaluation of programmes concerning education for
entrepreneurship. Working Party on SMEs and Entrepreneurship, Organisation of Economic Cooperation and
Development, France.
4
World Economic Forum. (2009). Educating the next wave of entrepreneurs: Unlocking entrepreneurial capabilities to
meet the global challenges of the 21st Century, a report of the global education initiative. World Economic Forum,
Switzerland.
5
National Academy of Sciences (2007) Rising above the gathering storm: Energising and employing America for a
brighter economic future. National Academies Press, Washington.
Industry
Research
Education
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
6
itself
6
. The argument proceeds that traditional business degrees do not provide the skill sets
required to transform complex technological innovation into viable commercial products. A
2008 report on best practice published by the EC notes the real challenge is to develop fully
integrated entrepreneurship education programs outside of business schools
7
.
It is also becoming apparent that the divide between the content of educational training
programs and the emerging practices of taking innovation to enterprise is increasing as a
consequence of the rapid evolution of industry. While this may have been an issue restricted to
the new industries (such as digital media), it is now apparent more generally across business,
commerce and the manufacturing industry. In the 2011 policy document Skills for Prosperity
8
,
Skills Australia recognised the widening gap between the industry requirements around
employability and industry-readiness, and the training of graduates. The policy document
espouses the need for industry to be involved in the training process citing as a reason the rapid
evolution of business, commercial and industrial practices in the marketplace. The traditional
training providers, industry argues, are losing touch with the latest developments in business,
commerce and manufacturing. Nor are the processes of up-skilling the training providers
adequate. Although Skills Australia was referring specifically to the TAFE sector, the same adage
applies, perhaps doubly so, to the Australian university sector with its ageing workforce,
transition from non-professional degrees and focus on research as the primary measure of
prestige. Concepts where training and learning is ‘just-in-time’, ‘360-degree’, ‘action-oriented’
and within ‘connected communities’ involving the ‘learner-as-teacher’ are emerging as the
future paradigms of teaching in everyday industries now considered as fast-evolving.
In 1994, two doyens of entrepreneurship education, Karl Gartner and William Vesper, argued
the heart of entrepreneurship involves action, and that learning-by-doing is the most important
enabling tool in entrepreneurship education
9
. Similarly, successful entrepreneurs often learn by
doing (action-oriented) and as required (or just-in-time), learning only what is required from
those in the know and giving feedback (or 360-degree), and are characterised by developing
extensive interlaced networks of high value individuals (connected communities). Most
successful entrepreneurs move on to mentor budding entrepreneurs (learner-as-teacher).
It would seem that we are witnessing a collision between the age-old problems of delivering
efficacious and successful entrepreneurship education programs and the new-age issue of
delivering applicable and relevant general skills training in rapidly evolving industries. This
convergence is not surprising as industry recognises the skills underlying entrepreneurship (i.e.,
the enterprising skills of risk-taking, opportunity recognition, action-orientation, drive to
succeed) as important for future business sustainability through innovation that is both
systemic and disruptive
10
.
6
Gibb A (2002) In pursuit of a new ‘enterprise’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ paradigm for learning: creative destruction, new
values, new ways of doing things and new combinations of knowledge. International Journal of Management Reviews
4(3): 233-269.
7
European Commission (2008) Best procedure project: “Entrepreneurship in higher education, especially in non-
business studies”. Final report of the Expert Group. European Commission, Brussels.
8
Skills Australia (2011) Skills for prosperity: A roadmap for vocational education and training. Government of
Australia.
9
Garter WB, Vesper KH (1994) Experiments in entrepreneurship education: Successes and failures. Journal of Business
Venturing 9(3): 179-187.
10
Christensen CM (1997) The innovator’s dilemma. Harvard Business School Press, Boston.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
7
Why this Fellowship?
The innovation and entrepreneurial skills that underpin the innovation commercialisation
sector highlight the emerging skills requirements of Australian industry. This ALTC Teaching
Fellowship looks to investigate entrepreneurial or enterprising skills in the Australian
innovation commercialisation industry and how these skills are taught in international contexts
of entrepreneurship education. This knowledge is essential for the driving the design of
education programs in the Australian higher education sector that will deliver the
entrepreneurial skills required for the employability of graduates and the future vitality of
Australian industry.
Program Aims and Approaches
This ALTC Fellowship has sought to listen to and assess both sides of a story about innovation
commercialisation skills. From those at the heart of the Australian innovation
commercialisation industry in order to gauge their needs, their expectations and their
experiences with the graduates they employ. The other side of the story explores the point of
view of those who develop innovative teaching and learning programs globally that target the
skills of entrepreneurship.
The goal of the Fellowship is to enhance the understanding and appreciation of skills
requirements of the innovation commercialisation sector and to begin to develop programs of
entrepreneurship education (or education in enterprising behaviours and skills) in the
Australian higher education sector that impart the requisite skills. The end purpose is to
incorporate the findings into education programs at tertiary level that:
• Provide avenues for students to learn the required skill sets;
• Improve the employability of graduates; and
• Increase the entrepreneurial capacity of Australian business.
Aims
This ALTC Fellowship encompassed three specific aims that determined the approach to
activities (below):
1. Determine the desirable skill sets for employability in the Australian innovation
commercialisation sector;
2. Examine and distil best practice procedures from targeted international contexts, and
3. Develop resources to enable best practice exemplars of education in innovation and
entrepreneurship to be embedded in the Australian higher education curriculum.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
8
Approach to Activities
Aim 1: Skills for Innovation Commercialisation
Stated Aim: Determine the desirable skill sets for employability in the innovation
commercialisation sector.
Considered Approach: A survey of Australian innovation commercialisation organisations was
undertaken to examine the skills requirements of the organisation and the perceived skills
deficiencies in recently employed graduates.
Derivation of Questionnaire
An early restriction was placed on survey coverage. Innovation commercialisation is a complex
pipeline process that begins at one end of the spectrum with ideation, creativity and innovation
and finishes at the other end with a product in the marketplace. Ideation, creativity and
innovation are not phenomena irrevocably linked to entrepreneurship; ideation, creativity and
innovation can occur in isolation while the entrepreneurship often feeds off them. It is
entrepreneurship that occupies the pipeline between extremes and thus this survey is not
concerned with innovation itself but the skills needed to commercialise the innovation.
All commercialisation pipelines require technical, generic and enterprising skills; the survey
aimed to evaluate the importance of the particular skill set requirements in the industry and the
apparent skills gap between the level required by industry requirements and that evident in
graduates entering the industry. A guiding principle of the questionnaire design was flexibility
to permit administration to both the core commercialisation industry as well as support
industries such as venture capital firms, start-up companies, new venture divisions of large
firms, government agencies, legal firms and research organisations.
Iterative rounds of searches of the extant literature and internet across a wide breadth of
disciplines were used to derive a list of core skills that covered the three recognised domains of
technical, generic and enterprising (or entrepreneurial) skills. Web-based sources of skills lists
included the generic and specific competences (e.g., business, sciences) of the EU Tuning
Project
11
. The graduate capabilities list of QUT
12
, which is essentially no different to that of most
universities, was also partitioned into individual skill traits and included in the core skills list.
Particular facets of the skill itself, its application and the degree of overlap with other skills
confound phrasing of the topics/questions around appropriateness of skills in the workplace.
Certain skills can be addressed easily. The core entrepreneurial skills of risk taking, opportunity
recognition and drive for success can be considered from a one-dimensional standpoint. On the
other hand, the generic reference to team skills, which appears in the list of desired graduate
capabilities of every tertiary institute on the globe, is more complex a trait when measuring
success of graduates in an innovation commercialisation context. Particular attributes of team
skills are of importance in driving a concept through product development. From a simple
11
http://www.unideusto.org/tuningeu
12
http://www.mopp.qut.edu.au/C/C_04_03.jsp
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
9
viewpoint, all team members must have an awareness of roles and responsibilities whatever the
team composition. On the other hand, the term working collaboratively has different
implications in teams of like-minded and like-tasked individuals versus multidisciplinary teams
where knowledge, skills and behaviours must be shared. In the latter case, the application of
team skills also addresses interdisciplinarity and interprofessionalism. In terms of application,
the manifestation of, or the requirement for, the skill spans a spectrum through various levels of
knowledge (awareness, competency, deep), to the synthesis of knowledge
(equivocal/unequivocal; understanding/appreciation) and the ability to apply that knowledge
synthesis to familiar and unfamiliar situations.
Approximately 35 core skills were analysed through facilitated interpretative discourse that
considered the various elements of overlapping intent of broad scope coverage and the myriad
multidimensional facets that each implied in the innovation commercialisation context.
Approximately 200 skill topics were derived centred on the manifestation of, or the requirement
for, elements of the core skill. Subsequent rounds of facilitated discourse undertook reiterative
differential categorisation, prioritisation and construct validation to realise 61 topics.
The final survey comprised 74 primary questions or topics grouped into eight categories (see
Appendix 1). The first category consisted of seven questions that addressed demographics of
the respondent’s organisation. The second category (credentialism) comprised six questions
that sought to ascertain the credentials of the respondent and recently employed personnel, and
to ascertain the utility of the respondent’s credentials in the decision-making processes of the
organisation. The latter topic emerged as an issue when looking at barriers to graduate entry
into the commercialisation infrastructure made evident to the Fellow as part of the outcomes
associated with QUT’s Bachelor of Biotechnology Innovation
13
.
The third category comprised the remaining 61 primary topics that addressed a particular
graduate skill (including behaviour or attitude) or its application, with each topic included two
questions:
• How important (IMP) are each of the following skills to your organisation?
• How evident (EVD) are each of these skills in the graduates you employ?
Topics within the six categories assessing graduate skill levels were distributed as follows:
• Entrepreneurial skills (15),
• Generic skills (11),
• Knowledge (4),
• Information management (6),
• Individual performance (5),
• Practice-focused skills (9) (disciplinary, interdisciplinarity and interprofessionalism),
and
• A miscellaneous collection (11) including stand-alone questions or questions with
considerable overlap between other nominated categories.
The questionnaire design included a Likert 5-point scale
14
with no neutral point to avoid
courtesy bias on the part of respondents and eliminate ambivalence as a common contributory
factor to surveys where questions relate to attitudes or preferences.
13
Collet C (2012) Bioneering ten years on: lessons from teaching biotechnology entrepreneurship at the undergraduate
level. International Journal of Innovation in Science and Mathematics Education, in press.
14
Dawes J (2002) Five point vs eleven point scales: Does it make a difference to data characteristics? Australasian
Journal of Market Research 10 (1): 39 – 47.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
10
Survey Procedure
The names of target organisations, their contact details and appropriate personnel, were
collected through internet searches of government and private directories of research,
development and commercialisation organisations and through searches using phrases such as
‘technology transfer’, ‘research commercialisation’, ‘technology commercialisation’, ‘venture
capital’, ‘intellectual property’ and variations thereof. For example, government directories
provided lists of Cooperative Research Centres, Centres of Excellence, research institutions and
technology transfer offices. In the case of large organisations, such as Divisions of CSIRO,
universities and research institutes, individual web sites were searched for the appropriate
contact point. Including discipline names in text the string (e.g. ‘creative industries’,
‘multimedia’, ‘information technology’, ‘biotechnology’) also extended the search scope. The
large number of results returned made this approach inherently difficult to apply and routinely
failed to reveal any additional potential survey respondents. By definition, the organisations
targeted are adjuncts to knowledge-intensive innovation industries and thus may not be
representative of the commercialisation pipeline but rather representative of the innovation
commercialisation pipeline.
As the industry in Australia is small, it was decided to undertake the survey by telephone
interview to improve response rates. The Institute of Social Science Research (The University of
Queensland) conducted telephone interviews during February 2011, and the survey achieved
207 responses from a list of 452 possible respondents (= response rate of 45 %).
Analysis of Results
Rather than testing theory, the survey was designed as an exploratory exercise with the aim of
building theory. The dataset generated by the survey is large and complex; analysis and
interpretation are still being undertaken. Survey data manipulation and statistical analyses
utilises the SPSS package of data to process and manipulate the survey data. A stepwise
progression methodology is being followed with the data transformation and interpretation as
follows: (1) an identification of the items (skills) of importance to the innovation
commercialisation industry using Pearson’s chi-squared tests for independence between IMP
and EVD, (2) classification of the items into constructs (skill fields) using exploratory factor
analysis to search for influencing variables with internal consistency of construct validity
examined using Cronbach’s alpha test, and (3) a search for causality using regression analysis
and structured equation modelling. As the analysis is exploratory, reiterative rounds of data and
outcomes assessment are being undertaken through discourse and reflection, with concomitant
refinements to methodological approaches, in progressing through initial stages of examining
the large data set.
Aim 2: Best Practice Exemplars of Entrepreneurship Education
Stated Aim: Examine and distil best practice procedures from targeted international contexts.
Considered Approach: Best practice exemplars were identified through literature and internet
searches. Australian exemplars were very restricted in number and have not been examined in
this survey. The QUT exemplars routinely sit atop the internet search results.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
11
Selection of International Exemplars
Reiterative internet searches were conducted with the search terms: ‘education’, ‘student’,
‘entrepreneurship’, ‘innovation’, ‘creativity’, ‘laboratory’, ‘space’, ‘enterprising skills’, ‘technology
commercialisation’ and combinations thereof. Although, education programs in higher
education contexts were a primary focus, results indicating entrepreneurship education in other
organisation contexts were also screened across the first 100 hits returned for any combination
of search terms. The organisation contexts outside of higher education institutes provided
mostly reports of programs provided through educational institutes, including higher education,
or initiatives of regional development offices of governments and councils.
For the European context, a number of European Commission reports provided a base line for
collecting information on various entrepreneurship education programs. The most influential of
these reports which informed the case study visits is the March 2008 report from the EC
Enterprise and Industry Directorate-General entitled ‘Best procedure project: Entrepreneurship
in higher education, especially in non-business studies’
15
. Across the European Union, the
contexts of entrepreneurship programs appeared more diverse in nature and more recent in
introduction.
For the USA context, internet search results revealed a more uniform approach to
entrepreneurship education programs with two modes of delivery predominant. In the
curriculum space, business schools deliver undergraduate and master’s entrepreneurship
programs with a strong theoretical content. Each year, The Princeton Review publishes a ranking
of the entrepreneurship education programs, undergraduate and graduate, based on a review of
the offerings of 2000 higher education institutes. The top 25 programs in either category
emanate from business schools or colleges. The second mode of delivery or activity often found
is the extracurricular business plan competition. Many of these competitions have been in
operation for some time (> 10 years). Most were not accompanied by any apparent training
process; instead appearing to rely on the innate entrepreneurial ability of the competitors to
provide a differentiating factor. Nonetheless, over the last three years, a number of initiatives
have been implemented which provide a less ‘cookie-cutter’ approach to instilling
entrepreneurial intent in students.
Literature searches were also carried out using the Web of Knowledge database, primarily,
Scopus and other databases available through QUT Library. Direct literature searches provided
fewer pointers than internet searches to active education programs that could be evaluated for
content and context. Where literature searches pointed to programs of interest, such programs
had already been found using the reiterative internet search routines.
Several guiding principles were used to inform the selection process. An over-riding factor in
selection was the context of the program; learning by doing and action orientation outside of
business schools was the initial criterion. Apparent size and scope of the program were
influencing factors as well as the advertised outcomes of the program. Other factors were also
deemed important. The aim of the Fellowship is to create materials that facilitate introduction
of entrepreneurship education in the Australian higher education sector where there is a dearth
of such programs. Factors such the apparent ease of program implementation, a diversity of
delivery modes, the level of staff involved and university support, sustainability and
transferability were also considered.
15
European Commission (2008) Op cit.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
12
Implicit in the selection process was an assumption that the programs contain a regime
designed to deliver training in a suite of ‘entrepreneurial’ skills in an environment of innovation
and creativity in higher education.
Aim 3: Resource Development for Entrepreneurship Education
Stated Aim: Develop resources to enable best practice exemplars of education in innovation and
entrepreneurship to be embedded in the Australian higher education curriculum.
Considered Approach: This aspect of the Fellowship aims to bring together the two major study
components: industry expectations and higher education curriculum. To provide a resource of
examples of programs, the different models of entrepreneurship education programs are being
developed into reports that highlight their educational approaches, context, organisational
structure, resource requirements and offerings. As there is an overall dearth of
entrepreneurship education programs in Australia, this resource should provide a “starting
point” for educators interested in following this avenue of teaching and scholarship. The
research collected has also been used to develop a number of entrepreneurship education
programs that are being implemented at QUT. These programs are serving as the testing
grounds for establishing the parameters, conditions and responses to implementing
entrepreneurship education programs in the Australian context.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
13
Skills for Innovation Commercialisation
Innovation has long been recognised as a key driver of economic growth and prosperity.
Increased global competition over the last twenty years arising from both the emergence of the
mega-economies of China and India, and emerging economies in South America, Asia and Africa,
has focused the attention of world governments, particularly in developed countries, on the
need to revitalise and stimulate economies. Industry and government awareness has been
accompanied by increased policy documents and initiatives aimed at stimulating innovation. A
deeper understanding of the issues at hand point to the need not only to innovate; but also to
commercialise and disseminate those innovations. With a heightened economic imperative
focused on innovation, the diverse industry that is innovation commercialisation has become a
high profile high technology sector with significant influence, impact and leverage. By
definition, and in contrast to the commercialisation process, innovation commercialisation is an
industry highly dependent on technical knowledge and skills coupled with a well-developed
applied and experiential framework to drive successful outcomes. Consequently, credentialed
individuals who build successful careers based on a learning-by-doing approach populate the
industry.
Diversity in the industry arises as the commercialisation of innovation is a very context specific
process; highly dependent upon the nature of the grounding discipline (or inter-discipline). For
example, the technological scope, the long gestation period in research and development (12 –
15 years) and huge financial commitment (upwards of US$1 bn) to bring an innovation such as a
novel therapeutic to market contrasts the relatively short timespan (< 18 months) and modest
investment (< $300,000) that can accompany a new application for a smartphone. The former
requires a larger, highly regulated, compliance-oriented pipeline process involving the
contributions of scientific inventors, mathematicians, chemists, technicians, product developers,
business people, venture financiers, lawyers, and an increasing number of clinical trials
specialists. Each is involved in leveraging their product onto a global marketplace through
alliances and partnerships with multinational pharmaceutical companies. In this instance, no
one person may manage the commercialisation pipeline from start to finish and the inventor is
likely to be divorced (voluntarily or involuntarily) from the process during the early phases of
the venture. The inventor of a software application is in a position to manage the product
development and commercialisation processes with a small team that can distribute the product
globally through a simpler framework relatively free from regulation and compliance issues.
Whatever the technological focus of the player, success in the industry is dependent not just on
the inherent novelty and utility of the innovation but on the ability to sell the innovation in a
market populated with competing technologies or services.
This phase of the study is being undertaken in conjunction with Associate Professor Damian
Hine of the UQ Business School. Dr Hine and I designed a survey instrument that could capture
the expectations of those in the innovation commercialisation industry and contrast that with
the experience they have had with graduates they have employed. The survey was conducted in
early 2011, and 207 useable responses were gained from mostly senior managers in
organisations dedicated to innovation commercialisation. Application of the statistical analysis
is being undertaken by Karen du Plessis, while analysis and interpretation of the survey data,
inclusive of reiterative rounds of discourse and reflection, are being undertaken in conjunction
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
14
with Associate Professor Hine. This report offers an initial assessment of the data emanating
form the survey.
Respondent characteristics
Electing to use a professional telephone survey organisation, the Institute of Social Science
Research, resulted in an excellent response rate of 45 % providing a data set of high quality. The
survey realised 207 responses from industry personnel with 94.2 % of respondents
representing management: middle (25.1 %) and upper level (senior manager: 36.7 %; CEO 32.4
%). Four sectors dominated the industry groups making up 88% of the respondents: health and
community services (20 %), property and business services (20 %), agriculture, forestry and
fishing (22 %) and a miscellaneous group (various) (26 %). Mining, manufacturing, government
administration and defence, utilities and communication services were all at or below 4 %. The
sector representation reflects the non-random sampling approach to target selection with a
focus on those organisations whose brief it is to commercialise innovations. There are some
accepted limitations to this technique; namely the problem of overlooking types of
organisations, especially small-to-medium enterprises. The majority (70 %) of industry
organisations were under 40 years of age with 55 % less than 20 years old and over half of the
organisations employed up to 100 employees and almost all had less than 2000 employees. As
one would expect, the geographic focus of the organisations was predominantly international
(49.8 %) or national (39.6 %) while those with a regional (8.2 %) or local (2.4 %) focus were in a
distinct minority.
Credentialism
The survey respondents represent a highly credentialed population of individuals: 42% had a
highest qualification of a PhD, 23.5 % had a master’s degree and 34 % graduated with a
bachelor’s degree (including Honours).
Of the employees hired by the organisations in the last three years, the majority (83.8 %) of
employees were recent graduates (37.3 %) or had graduated less than a year beforehand (14.1
%) or were previously employed graduates (32.4 %). Non-graduates accounted for 16.2 % of
recent employees. As noted above, highly credentialed individuals populate the innovation
commercialisation industry. A large percentage of graduates employed had the higher-level
qualifications of master’s degree (12.9) or PhD (31.6) and almost 42 % of employed graduates
have at least a bachelor’s degree. The high proportion of graduates with post-bachelor’s degrees
(44.5 %) supports the notion of an industry requirement for advanced knowledge and skills
base.
Figure 4 – Per cent qualifications of
employees in the innovation
commercialisation industry. Degree
abbreviations: Bach = bachelor; PhD = Doctor
of Philosophy; MBA = Master of Business
Administration.
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
15
When hiring graduates, industry respondents placed more weight on the importance of
technical knowledge (56 %) than that of generic skills (e.g. communication, team work) at 44 %.
Nonetheless, the distribution suggests that both technical knowledge/skills and a command of
the soft skills are considered important by management in determining the employability of
graduates in the innovation commercialisation context. The high demand for soft skills reflects
the nature of the innovation commercialisation industry where the success of players, and hence
their employer organisation, is dependent on cultivating relationships to licence or sell the
innovation to larger players in their sector, to form alliances with partner organisations and in
securing both R&D and distribution networks in a landscape of heavily competing technologies.
Although the commercialisation industry values the qualifications of the credentialed graduate
(56 %), work experience is recognised as an important component of employability at 44 %.
Work experience provides a contextualisation and relevance factor that is not otherwise
achieved in a degree course setting; i.e. recent
graduates are not usually industry-ready despite the
fact that many programs have introduced some form
of internship or industry placement in recent years.
Managers see that work experience provides
employee maturity, honing awareness of the
commercial imperative. In this regard, the high
demand for a level of work experience is reflected
in the gap analysis on the scaled questions (see
below), which highlights the perception that
graduates may be equipped theoretically for the
workforce but lack an experiential base that affects workplace decisions and activities impacting
on business success. Employers regard this ‘blooding’ of new employees in the real world
imperative as requisite training and the importance placed on experience is further reflected in
the responses to the question relating to the decision-making processes. What the observed
response distribution may also highlight are additional, possibly combinatorial, attitudinal
factors such as: (1) unwillingness on the part of this particular industry to engage in the early
training experience of the recent graduate, and (2) a failure of university courses to adequately
develop industry-ready graduates for employability in this sector. This may also be a hangover
of an Australian industrial landscape in which traditionally commercial entities focus on
production and distribution and leave the innovation to “others” such as universities, CSIRO,
hospitals, other government agencies and backyard inventors.
From the Fellow’s perspective, this demand for work experience as a component of graduate
employability may also underscore the success witnessed in the graduate outcomes of the QUT
Bachelor of Biotechnology Innovation when compared with graduates of the business –
biotechnology double degree
16
. The former comprises a substantive (one entire semester)
industry-based business development project around initial concept ideas which serves as
work-related experience whereas the latter lacks any directed high level work experience.
16
Collet C & Wyatt D (2005) Bioneering – teaching biotechnology entrepreneurship at the undergraduate level.
Education +Training 47(6): 408-421.
Figure 5 – Relative contribution of
qualifications versus experience considered
appropriate when hiring a graduate
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
16
The value of the experiential framework alters over
time and takes a prominent role in the decision-
making processes of management in an innovation
commercialisation context. Although a highly
credentialed population, the qualifications of the
respondents are not the most significant contributing
factor in decision-making activities (at only 27 %);
rather work-acquired experience provides the most
important component of business success (73 %).
This suggests that businesses decisions are
informed predominantly by previous experiences:
successes and failures and the learning that occurs as a result of these experiences.
These results highlight an interesting dichotomy between the relative contributions of higher-
level technical qualifications and work-acquired experience in plotting a commercialisation
pathway for an innovation. Evidence suggests the value of in-depth technical knowledge is
supplanted quickly as disciplines evolve and merge, and the importance of understanding the
complex technical aspects that are emphasised in higher degree qualifications is of little
relevance. Thus, in innovation commercialisation, there appears to be a requirement for a
threshold qualification as distinct from its actual use.
Collet (2012)
17
highlights the opposing attitudes that exist in the biotechnology industry
regarding the employment suitability of graduates of a blended undergraduate degree that
targets the bio-innovation commercialisation infrastructure. The employer target market of
biotechnology commercialisation is dynamic and high profile where players bring together
components of the commercialisation pipeline process. Players are usually highly credentialed
with a PhD and an MBA. Industry sector success is dependent on selling the innovation; usually
amongst competing technologies. A minority in the biotechnology industry maintain that the
course does not satisfy industry requirements citing the lack of depth in the technical discipline
and an understanding of the scientific process that can only come from a PhD degree. This
recurring message delivered at networking events impacts negatively on student attitudes and
arises from a misunderstanding of course intent, which is to create business development
associates whereas industry elements regard graduates as potential business development
managers. Other biotechnology industry players argue that the ‘must have PhD’ mentality is a
reflection on the credentialed pathway that the individual player took to arrive in the sector.
Senior players in the sector argue that the most valuable tools in the decision-making process
are work experience and the ability to learn the relevant disciplinary knowledge quickly. As
innovations derive from interdisciplinary areas, the emphasis shifts from an in-depth knowledge
of one area to an ability to learn and synthesise knowledge from an array of different sources (a
desired graduate capability!).
Prior to this survey, anecdotal evidence collected by the Fellow suggested that the debate over
qualifications versus experience was specific to the biotechnology commercialisation sector and
some other science disciplines, such as chemistry and physics. Furthermore, the evidence
suggested that such attitudes were not apparent in the technology-focused disciplines of
engineering and information technology; nor were they apparent in the creative industries.
First pass analysis of the data obtained in this study suggests that the must-have attitude
regarding credentials may be more widespread amongst professional fields and industry
sectors. Certainly, this dichotomy between requirement for a higher credential versus its
17
Collet C (2012) Op cit.
Figure 6 – The relative contribution of
qualifications versus experience in decision-
making activities
Entrepreneurship Education in Non-Business Schools
17
applicability in on going business actions both needs to be explored in a survey that targets a
broader array of industries and contexts and represents a worthy future investigation.
Graduate Skills
At the simplest level, the survey sought to ascertain the perceived importance (IMP) of graduate
skills in the innovation commercialisation industry from the viewpoint of the employer and to
also contrast the perception that the employer group has of the skills level evident (EVD) in
graduate employees. However, these variables are not necessarily independent. From the
viewpoint of the respondent, the relative importance of any one skill in business activity is
evaluated in comparison to a suite of other skills. The respondent is explicitly aware of this
process of the survey. In questionnaires of this nature, it is not unusual for respondents to rate
the importance of a variable highly as well as rate their own levels of attainment higher than
they perceive as evident in others. While an overall ranking reveals broad trends in the IMP
response (see Appendix 1) pointing to skills perceived to be of higher importance than others,
the high standard deviation values make simplistic analysis meaningless. For each of the 61
questions, the IMPmean response was higher than the EVDmean (average means: IMP = 3.6: EVD =
2.78). The results overwhelmingly suggest a substantial gap exists between the skills
considered essential for industry activity/success and those evident in recent graduates.
In reviewing graduate skills levels, the respondent is not engaged in a comparative ranking of
the skills in graduates; the person is explicitly providing a value judgement about a perceived
distance measure (deficiency) that implicitly provides an independent measure of the
importance of the skill in the respondent’s activities. For this reason, it is the distance between
the means of IMP and EVD that provides meaningful measures of skills importance (ie, IMPmean
minus EVDmean as a variable in itself).
It is important to reiterate that the design of the survey was both to explore industry perception
and to further build on pre-existing theory; therefore, an integral part of the stepwise
progression methodology is reiterative discourse and reflection regarding the meanings of the
derived constructs and then deriving appropriate next steps in data analysis and construct
classification and definition.
A Pearson chi-squared analysis was applied to test for independence between the IMPmean and
EVDmean variable for each question. Of the 61 comparisons, only four showed no significant
measure of independence (ability to recognise an opportunity, ability to negotiate, effective
written communication skills, ability to apply knowledge in practice). These four item variables
were discarded from further analyses. Two comparisons were significant at the p