Foreign-Born Scholars and Academic Entrepreneurship in Eastern Europe

The main aim of this paper is to discuss the findings of qualitative research on academic entrepreneurship among foreign-born scholars in Eastern Europe, a region suffering from a lack of empirical studies on this topic. The academics raised and educated abroad are often perceived as a key nexus in the knowledge transfer and innovative economy in the global academic supercenters, such as the USA, Canada, or Germany. On the contrary, this paper argues that in Eastern Europe, the role of foreign-born academics is very different. Due to structural factors such as a limited number of potential entrepreneurs, the traditional academic entrepreneurship in the form of spin-offs and start-ups is virtually nonexistent. Some academics, however, get involved in academic entrepreneurial activities in the broader sense of this term. Based on 140 individual in-depth interviews and selected success stories, the paper argues that in Poland and Slovakia, special circumstances have created characteristic forms of entrepreneurship (e.g., the “academization” of industrial knowledge). At the same time, the potential remains largely untapped. Institutional barriers to entrepreneurship (lack of special policies pertaining to foreign-born scholars, unfriendly officials, and political climate) are thoroughly discussed in the concluding section.