Faculty Participation in Technology Commercialization: The Roles of Process, Policies and Career

Technology commercialization has become an increasingly important activity for European and U.S. universities. Among the reasons for this importance have been declining government financial support for public universities, greater accountability to funding agencies, and increased expectations for commercialization revenues. Combined with recent economic uncertainty, the search for additional revenue sources has accentuated the need to better involve faculty in successful technology commercialization efforts. Thus, university administrators and technology managers face challenges in attracting, engaging, and retaining faculty participation in this effort. This paper reviews the relevant literature to understand how tenure and promotion policies can incentivize or disincentivize faculty members from pursuing technology commercialization projects. Prior research has focused primarily on the determinants of performance and benchmarking issues while faculty career path choices have been neglected. We address this gap in the literature by considering technology commercialization, faculty choice, and institutional policies in tandem. We conducted a systematic review of relevant literature on faculty involvement in technology commercialization and identified incentives and impediments for pursuing technology commercialization. Next we developed research hypotheses drawn from the literature review to assess faculty attitudes and activities, and their career development stage, based on the literature. Data collected through surveys will be used to test the hypotheses. We propose that the choice to participate in technology commercialization is a risk-payoff decision for faculty that depends on their career stage and subject matter area of work. As the faculty member becomes more secure in their position, such as tenured, the perceived risk of participation declines while the perceived reward value of incentives increase. As this perception changes due to career stage progress, we expect that faculty will be more inclined to participate in technology commercialization activities. We discuss how choices involving technology commercialization projects relate to a faculty career path and institutional technology commercialization policies, and how these policies are used to promote faculty participation in technology commercialization projects.