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This article describes how professionals leading volunteers can purposefully work toward developing the “leadership identity” of individual volunteers. These concepts and the application of them are presented in the context of Cooperative Extension volunteer groups. Specific methods of developing the leadership identity and capacity of individual volunteers and for developing shared leadership within volunteer groups are offered. This article contains many implications and applications for all types of volunteers, including those outside an Extension context.

We conjecture that there are five stages to academic entrepreneurship: motivation, governance, selection, competition, and performance. The process of academic entrepreneurship originates with the motivation of faculty, universities, industry, and government to commercialize knowledge that originates within the university setting. The model conceptualizes that the governance and competitiveness of the commercialized knowledge moderate the mode selection and ultimately the performance of academic entrepreneurship. The conceptual and empirical support for the model are derived from a theory-driven synthesis of articles related to academic entrepreneurship.

Accountability within distributed leadership (DL) is critical for DL to drive positive outcomes in health services organizations. Despite this, how accountability emerges in DL is less clear. This study aims to understand how accountability emerges in DL so that distributed leaders can drive improvements in healthcare access – an increasingly important outcome in today’s health services environment.

The authors use an instrumental case study of a dental institution in the USA, “Environ,” as it underwent a strategic change to improve healthcare access to rural populations. The authors focused on DL occurring within the strategic change and collected interview, observation and archival data.

The findings demonstrate accountability in DL emerged as shared accountability and has three elements: personal ownership, agentic actions and a shared belief system. Each of these was necessary for DL to advance the strategic change for improved healthcare access.

Top managers should be cognizant of the emergence processes driven by DL. This includes enabling pockets of employees to connect, align and link up so that ideas, processes and practices can emerge and allow for shared accountability in DL.

The overarching contribution of this research is identifying shared accountability in DL and its three elements: personal ownership, agentic actions and a shared belief system. These elements serve as a platform to demonstrate “how DL works” in a healthcare organization.

This study aims to conceptualise the role of knowledge transfer offices (KTOs) as knowledge brokers (KBs) and identify which factors are most significantly related with their performance for supporting public‐private research organizations (PROs), testing the authors' hypothesis for the Spanish case.

An empirical analysis is conducted based on data from RedOTRI 2008 annual report about 63 Spanish KTOs. A multiple lineal regression model is carried on each of the selected variables representative of KTOs' performance (number of priority patents, revenues from industry collaboration and number of spin‐offs) in order to establish possible relationships with some factors related to the knowledge process that characterize KTOs' activity.

A theoretical framework conceptualizing the KTOs' role as knowledge brokers is suggested. Factors positively influencing KTOs' performance are PRO's total annual expenses, the type of PRO, the KTO age, the existence of a science park, the explicit regulation of intellectual property rights, the number of specialized full‐time staff of the KTO and the availability of a patent stock.

The practical implication is the identification of those critical factors for the day‐to‐day operation of Spanish KTOs in their different ways of transferring knowledge, drawing managerial and organisational practices that may improve their performance.

This paper provides two original contributions for literature on knowledge transfer: a theoretical framework for the conceptualisation of KTOs as KBs, and the categorisation and further analysis of factors closely related to the performance of KTOs. A set of managerial implications for a better improvement of such institutions is presented.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the main factors affecting researcher engagement in knowledge transfer exchanges (KTE) in an Open Innovation (OI) context, devoting special attention to specific factors such as personal and professional profile, institutional variables, social networks and recognition.

An extensive literature review was conducted, focusing on current studies concerning the OI concept and research lines, OI and universities, KTE, and the factors affecting researcher engagement in university KTE. Based on this review a conceptual framework was proposed, including four main factors that affect KTE researcher engagement (personal and professional, institutional, social networks and recognition). The assumptions of this framework were explored in an empirical study involving 382 senior researchers, acting as leaders of different research groups, at Spanish universities. This was followed by univariate, bivariate and multivariate statistical analysis.

Results show that, apart from recognition, most of the proposed factors affect researcher engagement in KTE processes. The social network factors appear to be the most important, as all items were significant in affecting the engagement of researchers in these processes.

Both the study and the statistical analysis are exploratory, therefore results should be treated with caution. Moreover, the data were collected from only one country, hence, in order to improve validity, additional data would be needed.

Social networks (between researchers, businesses, university administrators, University Technology Transfer Office directors, etc.) should be promoted in order to improve researcher involvement in university KTE in an OI context.

There is a lack of research literature discussing factors affecting researcher engagement in KTE processes. Moreover, researcher involvement is a key factor in contributing to the success of KTE. This paper provides a thorough discussion of these factors and proposes a conceptual framework with which they may be studied in the context of OI.

There is an increasingly growing interest in treading beyond the traditional university goals of teaching and research to focus on their contribution to society through knowledge transfer (KT) performance activities. This paper aims to determine how performance management systems (PMSs) encourage lecturers to engage in the transfer of knowledge from higher education institutions (HEIs) to society.

This study is based on a sample of 3,812 Spanish university lecturers surveyed about different PMS tools – strategic plans, budgeting, meetings and reward systems – and different KT activities – research and development contracts, patents, extended patents, licenses, services and spin-offs – for the 2011–2016 period. A logit model was applied for the statistical analyzes.

As expected, enabling the use of these tools generally increases the probability of producing KT while only in some cases does coercive use reduce it. Moreover, combining enabling and coercive uses does not increase the likelihood of KT performance.

University policymakers and managers should reduce the gap between KT and research and teaching by, for example, examining the effects of their performance management practices on scholars’ perceptions and their subsequent behavior.

Despite previous literature states that coercive use decreases performance, the authors reveal that this is not the case for KT performance in HEIs. According to the findings, a specific record of KT, i.e. a coercive strategic plan tool, has a consistently positive effect on all four KT activities as follows: R&D contracts, patents, extended patents and licenses.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of patenting on the performance of academic spin-off firms (ASOs) in the post-creation stage. Specifically, our study analyses how the combination of knowledge transfer mechanisms by ASOs and patents can foster ASOs’ early growth performance.

The authors explored the relations between patenting processes and spin-off performance through econometric methods applied to a broad sample of Italian ASOs. The research adopts a deductive approach, and the hypotheses are tested using panel data models by considering the sales growth rate as the dependent variable regressed over measures of patenting activity and quality and assuming that firm-specific unobservable drivers of growth are captured by random effects.

The empirical analysis shows that the incorporation of knowledge transferred by the parent university and academic founders through patents affects the performance of ASOs. Specifically, the authors find that the number of patents is a positive driver of ASOs’ performance, whilst patent age does not have a significant impact on growth. Moreover, spin-offs with a larger endowment of patents obtained before foundation, surprisingly, grow less on average.

The findings have implications for ASO founders by suggesting that patenting processes reap benefits. However, in the trade-off of external knowledge access vs internal knowledge protection, it may be better to begin patenting after the foundation of ASOs.

The authors enrich the on-going debate about the connections between knowledge transfer and organizational performance. This paper combines the concepts of patents and ASOs by providing evidence on the role of patenting processes as a transfer mechanism of explicit knowledge in ASOs. Furthermore, the authors contribute to the literature on costs and benefits of patents by hinting at unexpected findings.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that the university context may partially determine the growth of university spin-offs (USOs), with a cross-national analysis and using an “interactionist” approach.

Two samples of USOs, from Spain and Italy (531 and 952 firms, respectively), were examined over the 2005-2013 period. Multilevel modelling was applied to empirically test the hypotheses.

The results confirmed that the university context is a critical and effective element for explaining USOs’ growth. The university context affected USOs’ growth only for the Spanish firms, while for the Italian spin-offs the evidence does not report a significant determining influence of the university context. This finding may be interpreted as the localization externalities, determined by the Spanish universities, have a more effective impact at firm level compared with those generated by the Italian universities.

The paper provides evidence that the university context has a significant role in supporting USOs’ growth in Spain, but not in Italy. This finding, together with the fact that the Italian USOs showed lower growth rates over the period of analysis, may suggest that greater involvement by the Italian parent universities is needed to foster USOs’ growth. The main point to be underlined to decision makers is that policies aimed at fostering USOs need the active involvement of the parent university in the whole growth process of the nascent firm, rather than just in the USO creation process.

A multilevel approach provides both methodological and theoretical contributions to the study of USOs’ growth, which was adopted as an “interactionist” approach is recommended by literature. In addition, a cross-national approach allows for exploration of the actual effect of the university on the growth of USOs, taking into account international differences.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how important technology transfer offices (TTOs) – which in Portuguese are called “industrial property support offices” or GAPIs – are in terms of fostering patent applications and technology transfer in countries characterized by low performance records in these activities.

Among the existing 23 Portuguese GAPIs, only eight agreed to provide answers to a semi-structured questionnaire survey. Content analysis was performed on the data collected using NVivo software.

The results show that GAPIs play an important role in the innovation life-cycle, speeding up the transfer of knowledge and technology to society. The regulation of intellectual property (IP) ownership and royalty sharing with inventors was identified as a major result, strengthening entrepreneurial universities’ role. In addition, after the GAPIs were created, networks were formed that facilitate the sharing of knowledge and experience and promote the development of further collaborative partnerships.

This study’s results offer new insights into how GAPIs contribute to socio-economic growth by fostering more entrepreneurial universities and increasing the transfer of technology to society. In addition, these offices promote the creation of networks between GAPIs, enabling them to leverage universities’ potential for participation in socio-economic development.

No previous research has focused on GAPIs/TTOs’ point of view regarding policies that enhance IP and technology/knowledge transfer.

Why do academic spin-offs (ASOs) have different growth performance? What makes ASOs grow better? Based on the perspective of academic entrepreneurs, this study systematically studies the influence mechanism of the growth of Chinese ASOs and establishes an analytical framework for the influence of academic entrepreneurs on the growth of ASOs.

This study takes ASOs of Chinese Academy of Sciences as a sample. On the basis of literature analysis, the questionnaire is designed to collect the measurement items of variables and amended after interviewing the well-known scholars and experienced enterprise managers. The entrepreneur capital theory and the triple helix (TH) model are used to formulate the research model. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis was used to analyze the relationship between academic entrepreneurs' social capital, human capital and enterprise growth. Data processing, reliability and validity analysis, hypothesis testing and so on are all carried out by Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS), which is a common method of first-hand data processing.

According to findings, capital of academic entrepreneurs exerted a positive impact on ASOs growth. First of all, ASOs growth is positively affected by external connections and human capital of academic entrepreneurs. Second, the institutional environment and location environment play a regulation role. However, regulation role of the industrial environment is not proved. Third, the research has shown academic entrepreneurs' capital and ASOs growth is regulated by both path guidance and resources support ways. Finally, according to further test, ASOs growth is positively affected by both business contacts and political contacts of academic entrepreneurs, and the role of political contacts is greater.

Inevitably, this research has limitations, to some extent, which need to be further improved and supplemented in future studies. First, samples are special. Due to the difficulty of data acquisition, this research only obtains data from ASOs of the Chinese Academy of Sciences system. Second, there should be diverse methods to measure the growth of ASOs.

Based on composition-based view and triple helix model, this study constructs an analytical framework of the influence of academic entrepreneur capital on ASOs growth and verifies the influence and mechanism of academic entrepreneur social capital and human capital on enterprise growth. The conclusion of this study provides empirical support for the development of composition-based view and also proves the effectiveness of this theory in studying ASOs related issues in China. In addition, the research conclusion is also the practical application of triple helix model, which proves the effectiveness of triple helix model in analyzing the growth mechanism of ASOs.