NSCPHD1105 Management of Innovation and Entrepreneurial Careers in Academia

As young academics you are increasingly confronted with new challenges and opportunities. At some point in your career, most of you will collaborate with innovating businesses, and some of you may commercialize their own ideas. To shed light on what to expect down these lines, this PhD course offers you insight into the realities of a) actively managing innovation in university and private-sector research environments you will work in, and b) starting your own business or finding alternative ways of bringing your research ideas to life. 

Over 5 course days, you will firstly be presented with determinants of new technologies, products, and processes at an organizational level. When working with private sector firms, four factors are crucial for understanding innovative performance: 1) Industry structure, 2) firm characteristics including their search strategies for new knowledge, 3) intra-organizational attributes, and 4) institutions such as intellectual property right and technology transfer arrangements. Through gaining knowledge on these four factors, you will receive an understanding of both the barriers and opportunities organizations that wish to innovate face. This insight into how the environment for innovation looks like will help you in your future work as scientists, where you will at some point collaborate with firms, work in firm R&D labs, or start your own business. After that, we will secondly move down to the level of you as an individual and aim to understand barriers and opportunities when pursuing an entrepreneurial career. We will look at 1) myths of entrepreneurship, 2) business opportunities and how they are both found and created, 3) modelling and planning your business, 4) financing and assessing the desirability and feasibility your idea, and 5) alternative ways of acting entrepreneurially in- and outside of science. Gaining background knowledge on these individual-level topics will help you to develop an understanding of entrepreneurship as a challenging but viable career opportunity for you as a young academic. In particular, you will realize that you do not need to meet a certain profile to be an entrepreneur, and that starting a business is only one way to implement your ideas.

The course will be conducted in corporation with entrepreneurial academics, business leaders, and experts in the commercializing of research ideas, thereby blending theory with insights from practice. We will run daily workshops in which an applied discussion of theories just learned will be the focus. We also give you the opportunity to meet with potential future employers, get to know supporting organizations, and talk to peers that have pursued entrepreneurial careers. On the last day of the course, you will in workshop groups discuss how you could commercialize your own research, what challenges you foresee, and how you would go about dealing with them. In this way you will also have a chance to reflect on knowledge and insights gained by linking it to your personal situation and career plans.