JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

The university role in society and economy is currently shifting from mere education and science to applied research and academic entrepreneurship. Highly competitive universities tend to signal about their entrepreneurial orientation by increasing rate of commercialization of the researches, technologies and inventions created by scholars within the institution. Nevertheless, despite this trend being very powerful nowadays, there are multiple hurdles in a way to successful commercialization. Certain criteria are required to transfer research or technology from university to industry which can be categorized in individual/inventor, institutional, technology and market perspectives. This research is mainly concentrated on studying commercialization of science based technological inventions from the market or business model perspectives. It also suggests that business model could be used by academic entrepreneurs and technology transfer offices as an effective tool to evaluate business opportunity created by the invention and endeavors to prove this suggestion on practice. In addition, this thesis reviews academic literature and provides in-depth view on following topics: university research commercialization and academic entrepreneurship, business model and business opportunity to build theoretical background for further analysis. The empirical part of the research was carried out on the ground of real case of commercialization project conducted within University of Oulu aiming to commercialize 3D solid-state laser scanner and create a university spin-off with this technology as main asset. The study follows qualitative approach based on action research. Selected method is especially beneficial in analyzing data collected during multiple meetings and discussions of project team in a period spanning around six months. The findings of the research revealed that examining the commercialization opportunity of science based technological invention is not an easy task — the evaluation process can be time consuming and requires comprehensive market research on each business opportunity. Proposed business model framework can be used to evaluate and, thus, identify most promising commercialization opportunities created by university based technologies, but under certain conditions. First, important market information on each application area should be available, so researchers should engage themselves into active information search from early stages. Second, real data from potential customers is required especially in case of emerging industry domains in order to answer the main questions making the evaluation process by academic entrepreneur possible — can the opportunity be considered as feasible and desirable. Addressing these queries carries predictive and very subjective nature, but positive assessment enables decision making, thus, being extremely important in entrepreneurship.