All in or spread thin? Hybrid entrepreneurship and the commercialization of university inventions
Authors: Aliashar Bahoo Torodi and Markus Perkmann
Abstract:
Hybrid entrepreneurship – entry to entrepreneurship while remaining in employment – is beneficial for entrepreneurs as it reduces the risk of founding a venture and enables learning. Yet little is known about how hybrid entrepreneurship affects venture performance. We propose that two mechanisms inform the impact of hybrid entrepreneurship; (a) complementarity between labor input into venture and employment, respectively, and (b) audience effects, referring to the signal implied by hybrid entrepreneurship towards external stakeholders. We suggest that the combination of these mechanisms will lead ventures launched via hybrid entrepreneurship to exhibit lower performance compared to those launched by full-time entrepreneurs. We confirm our conjectures using a unique dataset on European academic biotechnology ventures. We further find – supporting our argument around the lack of complementarity between venture work and employment – that negative effect of hybrid entrepreneurship on venture performance is attenuated when university inventions are based on the result of applied (as opposed to basic) research and when there is a co-founder with industry experience. Providing support for the presence of audience effects, we also find that the negative effect of hybrid entrepreneurship on venture performance is attenuated when the academic founder holds a greater stock of prior inventions.
Markus Perkmann is Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Vice-Dean at Imperial College Business School. His research interests are in entrepreneurship and innovation in science-intensive contexts as well as organization theory. In recent work he has explored the effects of becoming an entrepreneur on academics’ research production, and the penalties that accrue to multidisciplinary scientists in peer evaluation contests. He has also studied how boundary organizations operate between different social worlds, and how actors exploit institutional differences between these social worlds. He has published his research in journals including Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal and Research Policy. He is the founding editor of the journal Innovation: Organization & Management, and the founding academic director of the Imperial Enterprise Lab.