The rise of entrepreneurship in the world has grown in never-before-seen proportions with the advent of the Digital Era. E-commerce and global trading are commonplace today as people search for the best deal instead of what’s nearby and accessible. With millions of people becoming small business owners or freelancers, it’s not surprising that these changes have merged into the landscape of academics, as well.

While the so-called “gig economy” makes it possible for anyone with a skill, trade, product, or service to run a business for themselves, it takes academic knowledge to make it successful. Without applying basic scientific skills like hypotheses and experimentation to predict outcomes of how your business can fill a need in the world and how to market and target your audience, you are limiting your ability to make an impact. Savvy business owners know this and are becoming more academic themselves or partnering with academic entrepreneurs to help improve their chances of success and profit.

The History of Academic Entrepreneurship

The integration of academics and business is not a new thing. It is, however, a lot more obvious with the new capabilities for people to partner together all over the world, regardless of distance. Over the centuries, academic entrepreneurship has developed and adapted to the needs of society in themes such as:

●      Combining the need for research from the business aspect into the world of academics through the development of university institutions focused on using labs, scholars, and students to formulate research experiments and publish outcomes

●      Incorporating courses focused on entrepreneurial steps and process to instruct students regarding science and technology in the business industries

●      Interdisciplinary educational curriculum with objectives that bring in both academic and social areas of knowledge, using the combination to develop theories and ideas of how to improve societal structures

●      Involving academic faculty and staff in institutional areas of improvement in the community and businesses

●      Disproving the outdated ideas that academic research and entrepreneurship were two distinctly different pathways to research and development

Now, rather than a scholar having to choose between their own personal development through business or becoming a researcher, there are instructional measures designed to include both.

Where Academics Merges With Business

Correlating academics and entrepreneurship is actually a natural merge. It makes sense to integrate science and technology into higher education institutions since the research and development ideas behind them are used to drive innovative ideas in industries and corporations around the world.

Fostering skills for successful entrepreneurs in the academic world requires teaching academics to value characteristics beyond knowledge, including soft skills like being alert for potential opportunities to develop intrinsically and externally, learning how organization is crucial to success, being able to make decisions through strategic planning even when under pressure, becoming a leader and/or developing leadership qualities, and understanding how to handle people on multiple levels through the curation of interpersonal development skills.

Bringing in outside companies to merge with institutions also works naturally to solve another problem - that of financial backing. It’s expensive to fund research, so when institutions open their labs and staff to working with business owners, they are able to receive funding to cover the costs of things such as the upkeep of their labs and other buildings, the equipment needed to continually stay on the cutting edge of research and development, and the costs of those who are operating the studies themselves.

With so much hinging on collaboration between academic scholars and businesses, institutional administrators quickly understood the need for a symbiotic relationship between the two. This truly began in the 19th century, but the transition into the Digital Era has made strides to enhance entrepreneurship understanding and academic knowledge dissemination even easier.

Now, those who graduate from institutions that have already forged a relationship with businesses that offer the services dependent on those studies are able to seamlessly integrate into the real world working in those companies. Fields of study such as medical, military, economics, and national security have all been able to benefit from increasingly in-depth research through the collaboration of higher education institutions and businesses, and those who have gone through studies in which entrepreneurism was part of their education are able to offer a unique perspective combining academics and business savvy strategies together.

Academia and Entrepreneurs Can Collaborate on Impactio

When collaboration is the key to leveraging business success or your own research growth, Impactio can help.

The all-in-one platform designed for scholars gives you everything the academic expert and entrepreneur needs to create strategic research and development ideas. With Impactio, scholars take their research from the beginning data compilation and text input to the crucial areas of publishing and beyond. Even more, Impactio gives them access to a network of other expert users to strategize with and increase the potential audience of their work.