Of Horses and Jockeys: Perceptions by Academic Entrepreneurs

Although there has been increasing recent interest in universities as ecosystems for the encouragement of academic entrepreneurship, almost none of that work has dealt with the specific personal motives that might lead academic scientists to start companies. Metaphorically, there has been a substantial body of work describing how to create a better racetrack, some study of what sort of horses best perform in the track, but essentially no examination of the jockeys. We address this gap in the literature in two ways – first by “importing” a variety of psychological characteristics that have been shown to be predictive in the larger entrepreneurship literature, and second by developing a series of context-specific motives. Our study of 50 biomedical scientists in an academic medical center showed, unsurprisingly, that patents matter. More importantly, although the results for the imported psychological characteristics were disappointing, the findings for context-specific motives suggest that founders are distinguished from non-founders primarily by their interest in doing something positive for humanity.