Characterizing MIT's serial scientist-entrepreneurs in life sciences

Abstract

Since the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, the commercialization of ideas generated in academia has driven significant startup activity and expansion in the life sciences. This commercial transformation has been shown by others to be concentrated among a relatively small number of elite academic institutions. However, within these institutions, we find that a small number of prestigious scientists are disproportionately responsible for entrepreneurial and commercial activity. To date, limited research has been conducted which aims to understand the characteristics of such serial scientist-entrepreneurs or their significance in early commercial ventures. This study identifies and characterizes 18 serial scientist-entrepreneurs (defined as faculty who have founded or served on the board of directors of 3 or more startups) on the basis of academic impact, patenting, and social network centrality, as compared to their first-time entrepreneur (i.e., faculty who founded or directed 1-2 companies) and noncommercial peers. These individuals constitute a subset of 66 scientist-entrepreneurs from a population of the 493 scientists who served as faculty in life sciences-related departments at MIT, during the period of 1981 to 2005 (representing the primary commercialization period for biotechnology).

(cont.) The thesis highlights three key findings. First, the subset of 18 serial scientist-entrepreneurs founded or directed two-thirds of all startup ventures associated with the entire population thus underscoring the significant "skew" in commercial activities. Furthermore, empirical analyses revealed that these serial scientist-entrepreneurs had significantly higher academic impact (i.e., "academic prestige"), as measured by citations to their work, as compared to first-time entrepreneurs and noncommercial scientists. Perhaps not surprisingly, they also had significantly higher numbers of issued U.S. patents, compared to first-time entrepreneurs. Second, the serial scientist-entrepreneurs developed robust relationships with a small group of venture capital investors, who have repeatedly funded their companies. Several of these serial scientist-entrepreneurs retained central positions in the social network of faculty entrepreneurs, potentially brokering and accelerating entrepreneurial activity, including scientific advisory board membership, within the community. These findings suggest that serial scientist-entrepreneurs play a vital role in contributing reputation, deep technical insight, access to intellectual property, and relationship networks to startup life sciences ventures.

(cont.) It remains for additional research to determine whether the active involvement of serial scientist-entrepreneurs has resulted in enhanced startup value or performance.