Returnee academic entrepreneurship in China
Journal of Intellectual Capital
ISSN: 1469-1930
Article publication date: 28 April 2020
Issue publication date: 17 February 2021
Abstract
Purpose
Universities have become both increasingly entrepreneurial and international over the past few decades. We still, however, know little about the relationship between the two trends. This paper investigates the effect of international exposure of university faculty members on university entrepreneurial culture.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a specially constructed dataset of the entrepreneurial activities of 507 computer science faculty members—among whom 138 are returnees—from 21 research-intensive universities in China during 2007–2017, the study empirically investigates the relationship between foreign experience and academic entrepreneurial activity back home. We control for characteristics of the faculty member and the location of the university.
Findings
Academic tenure overseas is found to positively affect academic entrepreneurship. The length of stay abroad also affects the relationship: returnee academics with foreign Ph.D. degrees are more likely to start new businesses than returnee academics with shorter postdoc experience overseas. The economic gap between the host (foreign) and home country (China) does not have a statistically significant effect on returnee academic entrepreneurial activity.
Originality/value
To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to empirically investigate returnee academic entrepreneurship. It provides indications on how foreign educational background affects academics entrepreneurial activities.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the comments of discussants at the Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy, Atlanta, October 2019, and at the special conference of the Strategic management Society in Hyderabad, India, December 2018, and comments from the anonymous referees of this journal. Both authors acknowledge the infrastructural support of the Department of Economics at the George Washington University for carrying out this research. Nick Vonortas additionally acknowledges support by FAPESP in connection to the São Paulo Excellence Chair “Innovation Systems, Strategy and Policy” (InSySPo) at the University of Campinas. He also acknowledges support from the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics within the framework of the subsidy to the HSE by the Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5-100’. None of these organizations is responsible for the contents of this paper. Remaining mistakes and misconceptions are solely the responsibility of the authors.
Citation
Lai, Y. and Vonortas, N.S. (2021), "Returnee academic entrepreneurship in China", Journal of Intellectual Capital, Vol. 22 No. 1, pp. 8-23. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-12-2019-0281
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited