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Mistaking dawn for dusk: quantophrenia and the cult of numerology in technology transfer analysis

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. The growing literature on the drivers, dynamics and consequences of academic entrepreneurship shows the global diffusion of the entrepreneurial university model.

  2. There are, of course, significant exceptions to this generalization. Many PhD students are still in an apprentice-master relationship to their supervisor, subject to exercise of both benevolent and arbitrary authority. Nevertheless, such individual authority is increasingly modified by a PhD committee supervision structure and attenuated by the student’s ability to change supervisors and by participation in a research group with multiple formal and informal mentors. On the other hand, some firms, like the old Bell Labs and Google allot researchers a limited percentage of their time to work on projects of their own choosing.

  3. In Sweden, the “Professors’ Privilege” reserves all intellectual property rights to faculty members. In practice, university technology officers often acquire these rights from faculty members and then market them as in the US but the decision to patent, market or use the intellectual property as the basis of a firm is entirely up to the faculty member whereas in the US this decision is typically shared with the Technology Transfer Office, representing the university.

  4. Author Interview with Dr. Ragan, Director of Columbia University's Office of Science and Technology, 1984.

  5. Author interview with Neils Reimers, retired director of Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing, 2005.

  6. Leydesdorff L. Personal Communication 22, Aug 2012.

  7. Indeed, an office previously established to arrange university-industry collaborations at MIT was transformed into a university office to deal with government contracts at the onset of the 2nd World War.

  8. http://techventures.columbia.edu/venturelab/ctv-venture-lab-team. Accessed 9 Feb 2013.

  9. New Survey Shows the University of Utah among Nation’s Best in Generating Companies from Research www.techventures.utah.edu/.../PR%202-26%20New%20Survey.pd. Accessed 020113.

  10. Personal communication to the author.

  11. These may be considered “low-ball” estimates as they are taken from results reported to AUTM, that does not include all players nor are all entrepreneurial activities on campus reported to the office. A high-end estimate may be extrapolated from studies of the entrepreneurial activities of alumni of leading universities like MIT and Stanford. See Bank of Boston MIT: The Impact of Innovation, 1997. See: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/founders/Founders2.pdf last accessed 020113 and Eesely, Charles and William Miller 2012 Stanford University’s Economic Impact via Innovation and Entrepreneurship at http://news.stanford.edu/.../innovation-economic-impact-102412.ht. Accessed 929113.

  12. Author Interview with Bernard Denis, Associate Director of Technology Transfer at CERN, 2008.

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  1. Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute (H-STAR), Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA

    Henry Etzkowitz

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Etzkowitz, H. Mistaking dawn for dusk: quantophrenia and the cult of numerology in technology transfer analysis. Scientometrics 97, 913–925 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1007-7

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