Triple Helix Association joins up the strands for an entrepreneurial ecosystem

Theories of innovation tends to go in waves as people analyse successful regions and organisations for their tricks but at the Triple Helix Association’s collaborative workshop last month there was also consideration of what challenges people have to face.

Emanuela Todeva, senior lecturer in strategy and international business at the University of Surrey, hosted the workshop and introduced professor Henry Etzkowitz, president of the Triple Helix Association, who gave insights into how the development of American Research and Development (ARD) Corporation as a public corporation, a pro bono organization for regional development, after the Second World War was formed on the basis of this analysis among government, industry and academia – the so-called triple helix – for the first time.

Etzkowitz said: “Graduates of MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] would go around and scout the laboratories for potential technology that could be commercialised. Graduates of the Harvard Business School would provide the business advice to these new firms, and a long-term organization to follow through. It took more than a decade before they found the first technology with large-scale potential.”

But while that technology, the minicomputer, eventually was unsustainable in the New England area, it did leave behind “an organisational infrastructure, a venture capital industry and a panoply of state government programs that has to support the development of new businesses, an infrastructure that then was available to start the next science-based industry when the developments in biotechnology were available, and that is what is now the mainstay of Boston”.

Etzkowitz said that the for the triple helix to continue to prosper both the lessons of case studies, such as ARD or in the University of Tokyo before 1945, as well as how universities could become more entrepreneurial, particularly for PhDs, needed to be understood.

He added: “Some years ago, you could tell the PhD that, ‘oh, they get a job after graduation’, but now its well known that [their] chances of getting an academic job is 15% at best.

“So the PhD students know that if they have a good technology and they can transform it into a firm, that’s their best chance for a future job, whether or not they complete the PhD.”

So, just like Stanford University has started providing more support to its students wanting to set up a business through the StartX accelerator, so Etzkowitz recommends a change to the PhD.

“[The] entrepreneurial university PhD should consist of not the current international model of three published papers, but two published papers and the third element, a line of work carried forward to the implementation process.”

This set up the rest of the day’s discussions examining the fundamental concepts of Triple Helix, the essence of innovation and knowledge and technology transfer, the entrepreneurial behaviour that emerges within the Triple Helix model, and the critical role of institutions.

Tatianna Schofield, former business development manager at Imperial College London’s Imperial Consultants unit, said there remained challenges in building industry-academia relationships within broader, global trends, such as fiscal pressures, affecting international alliances.

The most commonly-cited challenges were time pressures, unrealistic expectations of intellectual property (IP) held by researchers and their institutions, the high cost of research, bureaucracy, time and the negotiation process, inter-departmental barriers, project management and the culture or mindset of those involved in the discussions.

Culture broadly fell in issues around academia wanting publicity while industry preferring confidentiality; curiosity versus problem solvers; those seeking scientific knowledge versus commercial applications; scientific freedom versus a technology roadmap; a long-term outlook versus those under pressure for short-term results from shareholders.

However, Michael Kitson, assistant director of the Centre for Business Research (CBR) at Cambridge University and hub director of the UK-Innovation Research Centre, said his study of 22,000 academic and 2,500 business respondents to his survey on the connections between university and industry went against conventional wisdom.

Out of 122,000 academics in the UK, 4% had been involved in a spin-out in the prior three years to the survey, while 5% had seen a patent licensed and 7% applied for a patent. He said what stopped further activity in these areas was a lack of time and bureaucracy rather than unrealistic IP-value expectations or cultural differences. He said a change in policy discussion from purely looking at numbers of IP patents, spin-outs or licensing to a more holistic one about facilitating networking and other interactions to allow serendipitous connections and ideas to be developed. He drily noted that just 2% of academics were involved in community through sport.

Nick Rodgers, founder of vehicle technology development services provider Productiv, said it was just this type of connections that enabled his business to be started. The UK government through the Department of Business Innovation and Skills provided a £7m ($12m) grant to fund Productiv’s proving factory after his discussions with people led them to say “apply here” to get the idea into practice as a way to re-shoring manufacturing supply chains back to the UK.

Building connections between the triple helix and startups and small companies is a primary way the European Commission is trying to enact its Horizon2020 innovation programme. Ruslan Rakhmatullin, in the EC’s smart specialization platform, said each country was setting up a network contact point so people could know what that region’s priorities were and who could help gain the funding from the near-€70bn programme.

To finish the two-day workshop, David Knoke, professor at the US-based University of Minnesota, and research collaborator with Todeva, showed just how multi-node networks or clusters could be mapped in areas, such as the entrepreneurial university, industry-academia interactions and technology transfer, to see the value of intermediaries and how these exchanges can take place.

The value of this sort of work is becoming clearer.

Vivek Wadhwa, fellow at the Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, in a June column for news provider Washington Post (see Government Corner), said that while legions of consultants have been advising regions to build science parks next to research universities and to offer financial incentives to selected industries to locate there, touting Harvard professor Michael Porter’s cluster theory as a way to artificially foment innovation, “they couldn’t.”

“The formula doesn’t work. The top-down industry cluster is a modern-day snake oil. Chile [though its Chile programme that paid foreign entrepreneurs to come and visit for six months] proved that it is people, not industry, who power innovation.”

Further research is needed would seem to be the conclusion from the association’s workshop.