Entrepreneurial Orientation and Knowledge Transfer Effectiveness: The Effect of Organizational Commercial Slack

The paper examines the role of organizational commercial slack (OCS) in mediating the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and the effectiveness of knowledge transfer (KT) in universities. The paper identifies two types of commercial slack in the university setting: financial and promotional. Four research hypotheses are proposed. Pooled data, that is, a combination of a questionnaire survey of 110 Taiwanese universities with a data set of university KT effectiveness from the Ministry of Education, Taiwan, are collected to test the aforementioned research hypotheses. The empirical results indicate that the EO of a university enables the university to provide appropriate OCS. Furthermore, the commercial slack of a university positively mediates the relationship between EO and KT effectiveness. The paper concludes that developing EO and OCS are crucial for improving the KT effectiveness of a university. Moreover, some managerial and policy implications for promoting EO and OCS in universities are suggested.

     

The determinants of academic research commercial performance: Towards an organizational ambidexterity perspective

This paper examined the relationship between organizational ambidexterity and research commercialization in universities. The paper develops two types of organizational ambidexterity: structural ambidexterity and contextual ambidexterity that influence research commercialization. Through a dataset of 474 academic patent inventors in Taiwan, the results revealed structural and contextual ambidexterity factors are patenting-, licensing- and start-up-specific. Despite both types of ambidexterity are complementary in patenting and licensing, contextual ambidexterity outperform structural ambidexterity in fostering university start-up equity participation. To promote academic research commercialization, it is necessary to build up a university as a dual structural organization that allows pursuing research excellence and research commercialization at the same time.