Exploring student diversity: Entrepreneurial Intent & Self-efficacy, Personal Characteristics, Creativity, and the Link to Performance in Entrepreneurship and Innovation Training

Summary. Teaching Innovation and Entrepreneurship for natural science or business students is a complex process, where not only knowing the theories of entrepreneurship, the elements of a business plan and financial planning is needed, but also skills in identifying opportunities in the market or exploring own creativity to come up new ideas for future startups can become crucial. Using applied teaching therefore also becomes and exploration of students own personal characteristics. In this paper I investigate the broader skillset and characteristics of the students enrolled in an innovation and entrepreneurship course. To understand the students I focus on studying the variation in a number of innovation and entrepreneurship related factors, namely entrepreneurial intent, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, personal characteristics (i.e. their profile in terms of extraversion/introversion, intuiting/sensing, thinking/feeling, and perceiving/judging.), and their creativity. The results show a highly varied group of students. The work is explorative and based on data gathered at University of Copenhagen (UCPH), the data analysis mainly consists of descriptive data and correlations. Finally I reflect on how the findings direct future teachingin entrepreneurship and innovation

The Determinants for Creating Valuable Inventions

Empirical studies show that only a small number of all innovations created are valuable innovations. In spite of this, most innovation research focuses on identifying the determinants of innovation, rather than determining the factors influential in generating valuable innovations. The current knowledge therefore can guide organizations to increase innovation output, but not to increase the value of the innovation output. The purpose of this PhD research is to contribute to our understanding of the determinants of valuable innovations by investigating how different intraorganizational factors and uncertainty influence organizations’ abilities to generate valuable innovations. This thesis is comprised of four papers, a general introduction and a conclusion. The papers rely on both qualitative and quantitative research methods. One builds on interview data gathered at a Danish university and a firm, one relies on data from the Scandinavian biotech industry, and two papers rely on data from the global hydrocracking industry

The effect of path-dependence and uncertainty on the value of mature technologies

This paper examines whether technological advances benefit more from path-dependent or path-creating capabilities. Consistently with recent advances in the literature, we argue that multiple technological trajectories can coexist in a field; therefore, firms may contribute to technological development by recombining in novel ways the capabilities that are widespread in the field, or by building novel and rare capabilities. The paper also conceptualises how technological uncertainty affects the value of such capabilities. Using patent data from 1977 to 2007 for firms developing the hydrocracking technology, the paper finds that both rare and widespread capabilities are valuable to the invention process, thereby suggesting that both path-dependent and path-creating strategies are beneficial for technological development. The paper shows that uncertainty has an inverted U-shaped effect on invention value. In particular, under conditions of low uncertainty, path-dependent capabilities tend to be more valuable. </jats:p

Anti-Counterfeiting Strategy Unfolded A Closer Look to the Case of a Large Multinational Manufacturer

We examine in detail how one large mobile phone manufacturer develops its anti-counterfeit strategy and seizes counterfeit products on the market. We couple qualitative data (observations from 150 counterfeit sales points worldwide, two focus groups, a survey with 151 respondents, interviews with 90 informants) with econometric analysis of 3,333 fights the focal firm undertook against more than 2,000 counterfeiters in 75 countries over six years (2006-2011). We focus on firm\u2019s seizure of counterfeit products when consumers\u2019 safety is at risk. As the firm is more sensitive to product safety than counterfeiters, we found that the firm generally performs larger seizures when unsafe products are involved, but this is less true in the firm\u2019s main market, likely because higher profitability offers higher incentives to counterfeiters

Designers as Determinant for Aesthetic Innovations

The innovation literature states that scientists are core ingredients in creating technological innovations. This paper investigates whether the hiring of a designer generates aesthetic innovations by a firm. Further we investigate what the level of design knowledge of the receiving firm means for the firms? absorptive capacity, in terms of turning the hiring of the designer into aesthetic innovations. We explore a unique dataset containing information on firms, their hiring of designers and aesthetic innovations measured by design applications (design patents). Our findings show that hiring a designer does increase firms? likelihood of producing aesthetic innovations. Secondly, firms with prior experience of aesthetic innovations are more likely to apply for design registrations. Thirdly, there is a positive moderating effect of firms with prior experience of generating aesthetic innovations on the effect of hiring a designer on aesthetic innovation outcome