Investigating the industrial demand for scientific knowledge

University-Industry knowledge transfer is a key factor for the economic development and competitiveness of regions. A low level of transparency on the market for academic knowledge is the major obstacle in exploiting the existing innovation potential of cooperation between research institutions and firms. This paper offers a methodological frame-work for exploring the industrial demand for scientific knowledge of research institutions, especially universities. As a direct survey among firms has major drawbacks we propose an inquiry of different intermediates, especially cluster managers. The applicability of the presented methodology is demonstrated with the case of a technical university in Germany. Finally, we introduce an illustration to contrast supply and demand. This constitutes a strategic tool for transfer relevant decisions of research institutions and allows to align governmental support to the real transfer potential that strengthens a region`s economic development

Revealing the Preferences of Social Financiers

Financiers of social entrepreneurs are typically characterized as having some form of prosocial or CSR related objective. While in some studies such objectives have been formulated on an analytically inconvenient level, other contributions are limited only to charity finance. In this paper we identify Fehr and Schmidt’s inequality aversion as an analytically tractable and most basic motivation of social financiers in general. Specifically, we show that the financiers’ decision structures and their observable behavior coincide with the experimental findings of Fehr and Schmidt (1999). Moreover, we derive behavioral implications for social entrepreneurs. Paradoxically, given that financiers do not prefer a self-consumption of the social service, they contribute more if the entrepreneur provides them nevertheless

Target-Group and Quality Decisions of Inequity-Averse Entrepreneurs

Limited donations force nonprofit entrepreneurs to ration needy individuals by deciding on who is served at what quality level. We propose a positive model of this allocation for applicants with differing incomes under the assumption of perfect user-fee discrimination. By following recent experimental economic research on social preferences, we assume that entrepreneurs behave inequity averse, i.e. they care about the relative consumption possibilities of others. We find that less inequity-averse entrepreneurs prefer to serve wealthier individuals at high reference quality. In contrast, more inequity-averse entrepreneurs care for the poorest individuals but offer minimum quality. Furthermore, as input costs increase, entrepreneurs with low inequity aversion change the target group, while entrepreneurs with high aversion do not

Public and private initiatives for regional development : an investigation of knowledge transfer and social entrepreneurship

Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaft, Dissertation, 2016Steffen Burchhard