intensive fi rms, the need for (or legitimacy of) public sector subventions to encourage this birth and growth, and the contention (buttressed by various evaluation studies) that some goodly number of these subventions are effective and effi cient.
But little is known about the extent to which there is overlap among the participants in each set of programs, or the extent to which there is overlap, whether the performance of those who participate in both activities exceeds that of those who participate only in one. Of course, performance of either group must then be compared with that of like individuals who participate in neither. Evidence of the ‘value-added’ of entrepreneurship education programs is found in the Charney–Libecap study of graduates from the University of Arizona’s program (2003). They found that graduates of the entrepreneurship program, on average, were three times more likely to be involved in the creation of a new business venture than were their non- entrepreneurial business school cohorts, were more likely to be employed with fi rms that license new technology or that license technology to others, and that, among self-employed entrepreneurship graduates, were more likely to own a high-technology fi rm than non-entrepreneurship graduates who owned their own fi rm. Missing from this analysis, however, is any infor- mation about the connection between the careers of the entrepreneurship graduates, either as employees of high-tech fi rms or as owners of such fi rms, and government–university–industry R&D partnerships, either in absolute terms or relative to the non-entrepreneurship graduates.
Embedded here are an increasingly more complex set of evaluative and thus policy evaluative questions. For example, to what extent do participants in academic entrepreneurship programs become high-tech entrepreneurs?
To what extent do those individuals who fi rst participate in academic entrepreneurship programs and then go on to launch R&D fi rms perform differently from a comparable set of fi rms that participate in none of the above? In short, a whole new agenda of research, evaluation and policy questions awaits.
of Joseph Schumpeter’s tenure as a faculty member. Refl ecting the advent of cliometrics, or the new economic history and the appointment of new editors, the journal underwent, fi rst, a major shift in content, physical form and, most importantly, name, becoming Explorations in Economic History in 1970. Consequently, the journal has become one of the major academic outlets for modern research in economic history, especially that authored by American scholars.
3. Historically, until relatively recently, the land-grant university-based system of agricultural research and transfer has differed in important ways from that subsumed under contem- porary models of university–industry–government R&D partnerships. As described by Buttel et al., under the land-grant university/state agricultural experiment station model,
‘the bulk of new technology was technology transferred in the form of production advice from extension agents rather than in the form of purchased inputs. Relationships with private industry were quite decentralized’, and occurred largely through ‘small, largely development-oriented grants from an industry to a particular land-grant university researcher’, and through land-grant universities ‘delivering public-domain commodity products … to private fi rms and quasi-private organizations such as seed improvement associations’ (Buttel et al., 1986, p. 297). This characterization no longer holds, given the rise of R&D-intensive agribusiness fi rms and academic patenting.
4. Walter McDougall, in Freedom Just Around the Corner, advances somewhat of the same argument, albeit with a broader purpose and more normatively laden terminology, in describing what he considers to be the distinctive theme in his recounting of US history.
McDougall writes, ‘It is the American people’s penchant for hustling – in both the positive and negative senses’ (2004, p. xvi).
5. Land, although not free until after the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862, was readily and cheaply available throughout most of the 19th century in the less densely settled areas of the United States and especially on the frontier. It promised economic and personal independence and proved an irresistible attraction to millions (Atack and Bateman, 1987, p. 6). Again, without straining historical parallels, one can see in academic entrepreneurship programs and state government seed capital funds efforts to offset one of the historic shortcomings of American land/agricultural policy, namely the provision of one factor of production without providing the knowledge or capital to make its economic use viable in a globally competitive environment.
6. Flagging entrepreneurial spirits appear to be a staple explanation of periods of economic retardation or ‘relative’ decline and, of course, are featured centrally in Schumpeter’s doleful forecast for capitalist economies. For an earlier effort to give some empirical fl esh to this analytical superstructure covering the period 1929–57, see Denison (1962, pp. 163–6).
7. The Bayh–Dole Act’s emphasis on small fi rms, though, has been interpreted as less a belief in the comparative innovativeness of small fi rms as opposed to large fi rms than a political tactic intended to dampen criticism of the proposal that it would allow large fi rms to secure monopolies based on public sector investments in academic R&D (Mowery et al., 2004, pp. 204–5).
8. They also have argued that ‘most of our assumptions about their impact on the US economy are really nothing more than anecdotal or based on folk wisdom or based on research that employs diverse indicators and unclear conceptualizations’ (ibid., p. 207).
9. The presence or absence of university participation in several of the major federally funded technology development and transfer programs (SBIR, ATP and MEP) affects the relevance of evaluations of these programs to this chapter, which, again, is centered on university-based activities. For example, Audretsch et al.’s evaluation of the impacts of the Department of Defense’s SBIR program points to the program’s contributions in
‘stimulating technological innovation and increasing private sector commercialization of innovations derived from Federal research and development’ (2002, p. 157). The study, however, contains no reference to universities as R&D partners or variables accounting for their presence, and thus cannot be considered to be a test of the effectiveness of university–industry–government R&D partnerships. Likewise evaluations by Jarmin
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(1999) and Shapira (2003) of the MEP program contain few references to the role of universities as hosts or participants in MEP center operations.
10. The same holds true for programs related to encouraging entrepreneurship. Program- matically, as sketched above, ‘entrepreneurial’ has become the proverbial big tent that now accommodates a diverse set of activities, participants and economic sectors. It can as easily be used to describe the rise of Amazon. as of Apple or Amgen. For example, referring to A.E. Hotchner, who founded the Newman’s Own Food company with Paul Newman, a recent New York Times news item notes that ‘Mr Hotchner, a playwright, biographer and novelist, probably never thought he would be a successful entrepreneur so late in life’ (New York Times, 21 March 2004, Section 3, p. 2.) This diversity makes it diffi cult to make analytical sense of what is being attempted under the heading of entrepreneurship: educational programs are not incubators, are not early-stage sources of funding for new technologies, and are not university-based science/research/innovation parks. Findings relating to the effectiveness of one such set of programs need not imply anything about the effectiveness of others.