2006 Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship Conference

In November, 2006, the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (IEI) at UMKC’s Bloch School hosted the 2006 Kauffman Foundation and IEI Research Conference on Technology Commercialization and Entrepreneurship.   The Conference attracted a community of 80 scholars from 17 countries who wanted to help build a discipline, create knowledge, and open dialogue about entrepreneurship and innovation worldwide.

“There just isn’t a whole lot of research in entrepreneurship and innovation out there,” says Michael Song, Charles N. Kimball, MRI/Missouri Endowed Chair in Management of Technology and Innovation, and the impetus behind the research conference.

Entrepreneurship is a relatively untapped discipline—and that is most keenly felt by the numerous companies that fail because they fail prey to the same mistakes that other companies have made, over and over again.

The planning for the conference started just three months after Song joined the faculty at the Henry W. Bloch School of Business and Public Administration at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 2005. Song, fresh from the University of Washington and eager to launch entrepreneurial research here in Kansas City, met with Robert Litan, vice president of research and policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Together, they hatched a plan.

“We wanted to know how we could create a real think-tank that spurred new research in entrepreneurship,” remembers Song. “One of the best ways to establish entrepreneurship and innovation as a field of study at the university is to create a process, a kind of infrastructure, to help faculty and scholars create high-quality research.”

That process started with a call for papers. Those submissions were then culled into the two-day research conference, which brought 30 of the leading entrepreneurial researchers from China, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and across the United States to Kansas City’s Kauffman Foundation.

The researchers offered new data and a new understanding of how to create and manage high-growth companies. One group of researchers tracked eight success factors that can help new technology ventures survive. Another group of researchers proposed how startups can better diagnose unknown unknowns. Other researchers traced how government, universities, and corporations affect technology commercialization.

Selected papers from the conference will be published in a dedicated issue of the Journal of Production Innovation Management, due out in January 2008. Song will co-edit this special edition.

“We’re building a research foundation for Kansas City and for entrepreneurs worldwide,” says Song. “With the help of the Kauffman Foundation, IEI is one of the leaders in building and developing entrepreneurship as a discipline.”