Ivory Tower?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Ivory Tower?

Ms Cresswell is a prime example of an academic entrepreneur. More and more policymakers understand that academic entrepreneurs are a university’s most valuable asset. Indeed, many British universities now need to measure spin-offs per 100 students and staff. After all, newly founded firms account for nearly all net new job creation, according to studies of the Kauffman Foundation. Academics (directly) contribute little to this job creation on average. According to one estimate from Sweden, less than one in 100 scholars per year quit academia to become full-time entrepreneurs. But up to 16 per cent of academics may run a part-time business which they founded. Several universities are already entrepreneurial. For instance, the Cambridge Science Park, Europe's longest-serving and largest centre for commercial research, at the University of Cambridge counts 1,400 companies and 40,000 jobs. Alumni from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created 25,800 companies employing 3.3 million people.

These figures indicate that many associate academic entrepreneurship with the natural sciences or computer science. However, we believe that broader conceptualisation and understanding are essential. Indeed, academic entrepreneurship is more than commercial spin-offs, run by patent-holding scientists.

Academic entrepreneurs can be chemists, computer scientists, engineers, economists, geographers, anthropologists or even historians. To us, academic entrepreneurs are those who apply their scholarly knowledge in commercial or non-commercial ventures in order to improve the world we live in. As Confucius said some 2 ½ millennia ago already: “The essence of knowledge is, having it, to apply it.”