From the ivory tower to the startup garage: Organizational context and commercialization processes

An impressive literature documents how individual-level factors correlate with entrepreneurship and commercialization behaviors. We have far less insight, however, into how different organizational contexts may, in fact, play a dominant role in shaping these individuals and their behaviors. In this paper, I leverage a unique case of commercialization in which a largely overlapping team attempted to commercialize a technology in two different organizational contexts – first, in a university and later in a startup firm. By detailing the contextual features in each organizational environment and by linking these features to the participants’ differing approaches and attitudes toward commercialization, I extend the current literature through a demonstration of how organizational context shapes not only the initial decision to become an entrepreneur, but also the specific ways in which individuals interpret and act upon an entrepreneurial mission. More generally, I contribute to the literature on the commercialization of university research by highlighting some of the challenges inherent in adapting a context optimized for exploration to the task of exploitation.