A couple of months ago I submitted an article outlining five major bridging capabilities of a VCP, bridging between entrepreneurship education and university technology transfer. It turned out to be a quite interesting article actually (if I may say so myself), and towards the end of writing it me and my supervisor, we realized that we had actually uncovered five rather interesting categories of bridging. Some examples below:
Experiential learning. A VCP attracts students that want to learn by doing… …business. This means that the students that want to do real stuff as part of their university studies can enter a VCP and get assigned some really hands-on tech transfer tasks. This is for the benefit of both the individual’s learning and for the university’s value creation through tech transfer. VCPs usually have developed strong partnerships with tech transfer offices (TTOs), allowing this opportunity for experiential learning. Thus, a VCP’s focus on experiential learning spurs some quite powerful bridging between entrepreneurship education and technology transfer.
Interdisciplinarity. A VCP cuts across disciplines in many ways. Students are attracted from across the university and put into interdisciplinary teams. They work with a variety of key partners within and outside the university. There are many other bridging aspects within the interdisciplinary domain. All of this means bridging between knowledge domains, bridging between various disciplines within tech transfer, and bridging between university and industry. This bridging would most likely not happen if it were not for the VCP.
Regional economic development. A VCP attracts students that might not otherwise have self-selected for an entrepreneurial career. Thus it bridges between the rather small “bubble” of people that have self-selected into the entrepreneurial ecosystem and a lot of people outside that “bubble”. These newcomers end up creating value for their region by acting entrepreneurially as part of the VCP program (and hopefully for the rest of their lives if they “catch the entrepreneurial bug”, which many report to do indeed).
I’ll stop there for now. Have to save some goodies for the journal article if it gets accepted. Right now the decision is at the journal Education+Training, one of Emerald’s journals.
