Date: February 15-17, 2017
Place: Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale, Centre Entrepreneuriat du Littoral
Since the 1970’s, an important number of innovative enterprises has been founded by students or young researchers in universities (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc.). The rise of academic entrepreneurship is boosted by the new information and communication technologies and new favorable public policies. But to create a business, for a student or a researcher, is risky and there are important inequalities according their universities from which they come. Students and researchers must rely on different kinds of social (formal and informal) networks to gather resources in order to develop their business. Formal social networks are built thanks to institutional resources developed by public policies, and informal social network are built by the entrepreneurs themselves with own social resources (family members, friends, colleagues, neighbor, etc.).
According this finding, the main questions of this permanent seminar will be the following: How do clusters, enterprises, universities, and public policies help to build the academic entrepreneurial networks? What are the main steps of public policies in Europe, Unites States or other countries to promote academic entrepreneurship? How do these institutional supports help to build entrepreneurial academic network? What is the profile of these academic entrepreneurs (students or researchers)? What are their motivations? What are their scholar and professional trajectories? What is the result of their initiative? Success or failure or another project? How do the academic entrepreneurs build his (or her) social network? Do they mobilize the strong (academic and professional) or weak ties (families, friendship, etc.)?