For two years, she tried to build the product while also meeting her research and teaching commitments, but the combination was impossible to sustain. Eventually she decided to take a leave of absence, and after 18 months she resigned and formed OK2StandUp, which serves nursing homes and other health care clients.
Yang’s story illustrates some of the challenges faced by those who develop entrepreneurial interests from within academia—a world that may be ill equipped to accommodate them. “The scholar-entrepreneur is an unknown person. The scholar-entrepreneur is typically viewed by the established academy as suspicious,” says Ruth Okediji, a Harvard Law School professor and codirector of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
UNIVERSITIES ARE GOLD mines of potential sources of impact, says Joshua Gans, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and chief economist of the Creative Destruction Lab. “There are Rembrandts in the attic,” adds Gans, referring to output produced by academics “all around the world who have done work that is capable of being commercialized.”
University-based commercialization took off in 1980, when the Bayh-Dole Act allowed US universities to retain ownership of, and profit from, faculty inventions built using federal research funding. The profit is shared with faculty inventors and external partners. Academic technology transfer offices have since become well-oiled machines for patenting and licensing innovations, and also producing spinoffs. Tenure-track faculty typically assume advisory or consultant roles while students or other partners lead commercialization.
Universities often allow a modest weekly time allowance or temporary leaves of absence to explore opportunities, and they may rent lab space to startups. Institutions sometimes take equity in faculty startups; according to a 2021 survey conducted by AUTM, which represents US technology transfer professionals, of the 124 surveyed universities with startups formed in 2021, 92 held equity in at least one.
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