Eunice Yang first tasted entrepreneurship in her twenties, when she helped run her family’s carton manufacturing business. Five years later, after the business was acquired, she enrolled in a PhD program at Pennsylvania State University. By 2014 she was a tenured professor in mechanical engineering at University of Pittsburgh–Johnstown. After being approached by a colleague in the nursing school, Yang developed an AI-based solution for preventing falls in older adults (rather than detecting them after the fact).
“I said, ‘I’ve got to make this,’” Yang tells me. “If it’s a reality in my mind, and if it’s working on paper and the computer algorithm is showing that it can, then I can’t just stay at University of Pittsburgh and treat this as a research project. I need to commercialize this.”
For two years, she tried to build the product while also meeting her research and teaching commitments, but the combination was impossible to sustain. Eventually she decided to take a leave of absence, and after 18 months she resigned and formed OK2StandUp, which serves nursing homes and other health care clients.
Yang’s story illustrates some of the challenges faced by those who develop entrepreneurial interests from within academia—a world that may be ill equipped to accommodate them. “The scholar-entrepreneur is an unknown person. The scholar-entrepreneur is typically viewed by the established academy as suspicious,” says Ruth Okediji, a Harvard Law School professor and codirector of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
Universities are gold mines of potential sources of impact, says Joshua Gans, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and chief economist of the Creative Destruction Lab. “There are Rembrandts in the attic,” adds Gans, referring to output produced by academics “all around the world who have done work that is capable of being commercialized.”
University-based commercialization took off in 1980, when the Bayh-Dole Act allowed US universities to retain ownership of, and profit from, faculty inventions built using federal research funding. The profit is shared with faculty inventors and external partners. Academic technology transfer offices have since become well-oiled machines for patenting and licensing innovations, and also producing spinoffs. Tenure-track faculty typically assume advisory or consultant roles while students or other partners lead commercialization. Universities often allow a modest weekly time allowance or temporary leaves of absence to explore opportunities, and they may rent lab space to startups. Institutions sometimes take equity in faculty startups; according to a 2021 survey conducted by AUTM, which represents US technology transfer professionals, of the 124 surveyed universities with startups formed in 2021, 92 held equity in at least one.
While existing support structures work reasonably well for faculty members dabbling in innovation, there is no long-term road map for more involved scholar-entrepreneurs, forcing many early-career scholars to eventually choose between one or the other. Tiffany St. Bernard, a postdoctoral fellow in the Runway Startup postdoc program at Cornell Tech, is currently at this fork in the road. She is the founder of HairDays, a beauty tech company that uses computer vision to give recommendations about hair care. St. Bernard is hesitant to try building her company as a faculty member. During her graduate years at Cornell, she’s seen how entrepreneurially inclined professors struggle to straddle the two worlds, even amidst the rollout of university initiatives encouraging innovation. She’s also worried that waiting until after tenure to launch her startup would lower her chances of success. “It would be harder to have the energy and stamina when I’m older to go the entrepreneurship route,” she says.
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