Universities’ Role as Catalysts for Venture Creation

Author(s):  
Thomas O’Neal ◽  
Henriette Schoen

Universities are being asked to play an increasingly larger role in communities as catalysts for venture creation. Some universities have embraced taking an active role, often filling gaps in the local entrepreneurial environment, to induce venture creation. This chapter discusses the role the University of Central Florida (UCF) in Orlando, USA, has taken when partnering with local economic development entities in academic to practitioner-based activities. Over the last 12 years, UCF’s Office of Research and Commercialization (UCF ORC) has continuously worked on improving the process of getting ideas from the university laboratories and the community out to the market to help the community grow and flourish. UCF and a growing number of other universities are creating a suite of Entrepreneurial Support Entities (ESEs) that provide entrepreneurial help in all of a company’s development stages. This chapter presents the interactions among the ESEs, with UCF serving as an example to demonstrate the impact a university can have on its surroundings and on the community’s development. There are many examples of such interactions across the US at other universities as well.

Economics ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 1311-1339
Author(s):  
Thomas O'Neal ◽  
Henriette Schoen

Universities are being asked to play an increasingly larger role in communities as catalysts for venture creation. Some universities have embraced taking an active role, often filling gaps in the local entrepreneurial environment, to induce venture creation. This chapter discusses the role the University of Central Florida (UCF) in Orlando, USA, has taken when partnering with local economic development entities in academic to practitioner-based activities. Over the last 12 years, UCF's Office of Research and Commercialization (UCF ORC) has continuously worked on improving the process of getting ideas from the university laboratories and the community out to the market to help the community grow and flourish. UCF and a growing number of other universities are creating a suite of Entrepreneurial Support Entities (ESEs) that provide entrepreneurial help in all of a company's development stages. This chapter presents the interactions among the ESEs, with UCF serving as an example to demonstrate the impact a university can have on its surroundings and on the community's development. There are many examples of such interactions across the US at other universities as well.


Author(s):  
Anna Szopa ◽  
Tadeusz Marek

Deficiency of business understanding and experience, strong industry competition, and small firm fragility are some of the most often cited arguments that justify business failure. This chapter presents the impact that top management can have on the development of new firms. The findings are based on case studies consisting out of three firms spun off from the University of Maryland and the University of Central Florida. The source data is gathered from observations, semi-structured interviews, commercial databases, as well as publicly available data. The results show that external Chair Executive Officers (CEO) positively influence the process of creation and management of university spin-offs.


Author(s):  
Haroon Rashid ◽  
Jonathan D. Kibble

Gap years have grown in popularity among students attempting to go to medical school in recent years. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), more than half of matriculated students now have taken time off between their undergraduate studies and medical school. While many claim benefits to taking gap years, research on the impacts of these experiences on medical students is largely nonexistent. This study aims to qualitatively analyze the gap year phenomenon and its impacts on medical students through semi-structured interviews conducted at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine. Through these interviews, the research team collected in-depth responses that were thematically analyzed. Analysis revealed the following major themes regarding the impacts of gap years: 1) adaptability to change and failure, 2) professional identity formation and understanding of team role, 3) understanding the "real world", 4) refocusing of goals, 5) resilience and stress management, and 6) reinforcement of motivation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Association Of College & Research Libraries

Penny Beile is associate director for research, education, and engagement at the University of Central Florida, a position she has held since 2013. Prior to this, Beile served as head of the Curriculum Materials Center and interim head of reference services at the University of Central Florida (1998–2013), as head of education resources and social sciences reference librarian at Louisiana State University (1994–98), and as social sciences reference librarian at Miami (OH) University (1992–94).Karen Munro is associate dean of libraries, learning, and research services at Simon Fraser University, a position she has held since 2017. Prior to this, Munro served as head of the Portland Library and Learning Commons at the University of Oregon (2008–17), as e-learning librarian at the University of California-Berkeley (2005–08), and as literature librarian at the University of Oregon (2002–05).


Author(s):  
Dr. M. Vairavan ◽  
Ms. K. Kavitha

Majority of the rural women of SHGs are Micro - Entrepreneurs very few are associated with Small Scale Enterprises. Those women are not only developing with sustainable economy but also able to develop other women economically sustainable by providing job opportunities. The rural women entrepreneurs with the sustainable economic development are able to contribute to the family’s, community’s and the nation’s development. Rural women frequently have primary responsibility for agricultural production, in addition to domestic responsibilities and childcare. In developing country like India where economic status of women is very pathetic especially in rural areas and opportunities of earning are very less in this scenario the Self Help Groups (SHGs) have paved the way for economic independence of rural women. This paper reviews concisely the literature in this field and addresses in particular opportunities and challenges faced by women entrepreneurs in rural areas. It examined the impact on women empowerment through micro entrepreneurship development and SHGs. The increasing presence of women in the business field as entrepreneurs has changed the demographic characteristics of business and economic growth of the country. Women-owned businesses enterprises are playing a more active role in society and the economy, inspiring academics to focus on this interesting phenomenon. This paper focuses on the problems, issues, challenges faced by women entrepreneurs, how to overcome them and to analyze policies of India government for and problems faced by them while pursuing their business.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-41
Author(s):  
Yetty Yetty ◽  
Abdurrahman Senuk ◽  
Chairullah Amin

The local development approach based on islands is different with the developing of land area. The natural limitations possessed by the islands region that constrained by some characteristics such as isolation, smallness, boundless, and fragmentation. The study analyzes the impact of port connectivity to the local economic development by taking the case in the island province (North Maluku) in east Indonesia. The analysis method using the panel data model of 9 residences in period 2010-2016 in which the indicators that used are GDP, roadway, port throughput, economic density, and also container port, sea-tollway as the dummy variables. According to the common effect, model shows that all independent variables have a significant influence on the GDP except roadway. While based on Hausman test suggest that random effect model is more appropriated than FEM of which the result shows that container port and sea-tollway have not a significant impact on the GDP. These results implied that the policy of port connectivity within sea-tollway is not effective to improve the local economic development in particular in the islands based on region.


Author(s):  
Pontso Chomane ◽  
Maréve I. Biljohn

Background: Approaches such as social innovation were visible during many of the responses that public-sector organisations, civil society, communities, and the private sector collaboratively implemented to address the issues of unemployment and the impact of economic challenges during the global COVID-19 pandemic. The use of social innovation as an approach to local economic development by South African municipalities, however, reveals a research gap in terms of a conceptual framework for enabling such use.Aim: This article explores a conceptual framework for using social innovation as an approach to local economic development by South African municipalities.Setting: Conventional top-down local economic development approaches by South African municipalities have become inadequate for dealing with contemporary local economic development challenges. Such inadequacy calls for municipalities to rethink and adapt their approach to dealing with economic challenges and to developing and implementing their local economic development strategies.Methods: Through an interpretivist paradigm, the adopted methodology is underpinned by a qualitative research approach. Content analysis was performed of relevant research documents concerning social innovation and local economic development. From this content analysis, a conceptual framework was developed through an inductive approach.Results: The findings illustrate that the praxis for using this conceptual framework is vested in the interconnected nature of its attributes, antecedents, and consequences, which will contribute to the achievement of certain local economic development outcomes.Conclusion: This article suggests that a conceptual framework could contribute to stimulating future research concerning the phenomenon and can serve as an impetus and direction for research inquiry.


2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric J. Stokan

This article empirically tests the impact of failing to account for state-level authorization when explaining the factors that lead municipalities to use tax abatements, tax increment financing, and enterprise zones. Although existing research implicitly assumes that state-level authorization exists, this article demonstrates that this unfounded assumption leads to biased estimates using the 1999, 2004, and 2009 International City/County Management Association (ICMA) Economic Development Survey data on a nationwide set of municipalities. This article refines what is known about the factors, leading to the usage of these three policies before offering implications for practitioners and researchers of local economic development.


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