Steven Tello

The commercialization of medical devices and biotechnology products is characterized by high failure rates and long development lead times particularly among start-up enterprises. To increase the success rate of these high-risk ventures, the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML) and University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS) partnered to create key academic support centers with programs to accelerate entrepreneurship and innovation in this industry. In 2008, UML and UMMS founded the Massachusetts Medical Device Development Center (M2D2), which is a business and technology incubator that provides business planning, product prototyping, laboratory services, access to clinical testing, and ecosystem networking to medical device and biotech start-up firms. M2D2 has three physical locations that encompass approximately 40,000 square feet. Recently, M2D2 leveraged these resources to expand into new areas such as health security, point of care technologies for heart, lung, blood, and sleep disorders, and rapid diagnostics to detect SARS-CoV-2. Since its inception, M2D2 has vetted approximately 260 medical device and biotech start-up companies for inclusion in its programs and provided active support to more than 80 firms. This manuscript describes how two UMass campuses leveraged institutional, state, and Federal resources to create a thriving entrepreneurial environment for medical device and biotech companies.

Research Summary: As a firm‐level attribute, entrepreneurial orientation (EO)'s beneficial relationship to firm performance has been established in the corporate sector; however, its implications in other sectors including university settings remain a rather underexplored area. Based on a sample of 107 universities in the United States, we examine the impact of EO on a wide range of university performance measures from commercialization of intellectual property to more comprehensive university performance metrics. Our findings underscore the critical importance of EO in the context of universities and also reveal the moderation effects of university characteristics such as size and the presence of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) focus. Managerial Summary: This study examines the impact of EO on university performance. Our findings can be of significance to higher education administrators in several ways. First, we draw attention to the need to recognize university EO as the glue that binds resources together for discovery and exploitation of opportunities. Furthermore, the evidence connecting EO to the U.S. News and World rankings demonstrates that leveraging university EO has potential to impact metrics that many of its stakeholders pay attention to. In addition, our findings suggest that large universities and those with a STEM focus are able to better leverage the EO shift upward in their rankings, which provides guidance for university administrators on how to strategically create and develop new academic programs.

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has been examined immensely through a growing stream of research in both entrepreneurship and strategic management literature. As a firm-level attribute, the beneficial relationship to firm performance has been established in the corporate sector leaving EO’s implications in other sectors including university settings a rather underexplored area. Further, measurement of EO has been dominated by use of scales of initially proposed by Miller, warranting need for alternative method development. Our study adds to the body of literature that seeks to understand the dimensionality of EO and in contexts other than firms. We employ the use of content analysis of university president letters to measure university EO and establish its relationship to both commercialization of intellectual property and regional business development outcomes. The findings have significant managerial implications for higher education administrators as institutional adaptiveness, capacity of universities to generate new knowledge and facilitate spillovers that spur regional economic growth are true reflections of university entrepreneurialism.

Increased demands for accountability among state and federal policy makers require that colleges and universities improve the process of measuring student learning outcomes. Despite a growing need, there has been limited development of integrated, electronic processes and tools that facilitate assessment of student progress toward program-level learning outcomes. Collecting student course materials, classifying by program and course-level objectives and reporting the results remains a tedious and labor-intensive task. This project demonstrates how course-level assessment data from a learning management system (LMS) can be utilized for program-level outcomes assessment. A pilot system was developed to integrate data from a LMS to provide continuous reporting of program and course-level assessment with minimal additional effort from faculty and students. This chapter shares the authors’ outcomes assessment system development approach, faculty development approach, and the lessons learned from their project, including the challenges confronted during system implementation.

This study utilized the setting of a technology incubator to analyze how nascent entrepreneurs develop and leverage networks to secure resources as part of the venture creation process. Through rigorous qualitative methods, we examined how six medical device entrepreneurs used networks to obtain needed resources, the types of resources pursued and differences among entrepreneurs based on their level of network skill. Our findings illustrate the importance of the incubator in providing both tangible resources (funding, space, equipment) and less tangible but equally important resources (credibility, relationships, access to networks). Initial findings suggest that differences in the level of an entrepreneurs’ network skill relate to the development, but not necessarily the success, of the venture.