The Forgotten Individuals in the Commercialization of Science: Attitudes and skills in relation to commercialization in Sweden

Book chapter, 2008

This chapter addresses whether and why individual researchers have the skills and attitudes necessary for commercialization in Sweden, and place this in relation to the services provided by the university for commercialization. The Swedish innovation system has been focused upon explicitly organizing the support structure of an individual university, and includes services such as technology transfer offices, access to patent attorneys, localities of science parks, consultancy for business plans and setting up companies, etc. Much current public policy and also the strategy documents of specific universities stress the need to build such large-scale systems. This chapter analyzes commercialization and patenting, through a questionnaire to 1200 Swedish university researchers, with a 24% response rate. The researchers work within six research fields, namely fluid mechanics, wood technology, biotechnology, computer science, automatic control and inorganic chemistry. The questionnaire of Swedish academics also includes research groups at different universities within these fields. All research centres financed by the strategic research grants had a mission to both develop ‘high quality science’ and to ‘promote interaction with industry’ within their field. This chapter thus turns the question from the national innovation system towards skills and attitudes of the individual researcher.