The University of Cambridge Entrepreneurship Centre: Knowledge-Based Entrepreneurship

The University of Cambridge Entrepreneurship Centre was established with funds from the U.K. government in the autumn of 1999. The center, which is currently seeking additional funding from the private sector, was established to develop the commercial potential of discoveries in the university. This was needed because of the poor linkages between the university and surrounding business and a lack of entrepreneurial culture within the university itself, ultimately resulting in too few spin-offs and start-ups.

The Centre's vision is to ensure that greater Cambridge becomes the leading region for knowledge-based entrepreneurship in Europe. While the objectives it has set for itself are:

• To build an entrepreneurial culture within the University of Cambridge

• To train, develop, and support the people necessary to make new knowledge-based ventures successful. The Centre wishes to make an impact on four levels:

  • University of Cambridge: identify, construct, and give support to enterprises based upon knowledge derived from the university

  • East of England: provide support and counseling on entrepreneurship and the management of innovation to the business community in the region

  • United Kingdom: contribute to national goals of economic growth, competitiveness and productivity

  • Internationally: bring in aspiring entrepreneurs from other regions and participate in international collaboration, through which collaborators will be able to learn from each other

The Centre is active with three core areas:

1. Educational activities to inspire , build skills, and train their application through a course for graduate science and technology students called "Basics of Building a Business," a Web-based course on finance and technology ventures, a summer school, a lecture series, and business plan competitions.

2. Advice and mentoring of new ventures and entrepreneurs at early stages of development, including one-on-one advice clinics.

3. Research into best practices for the creation and development of world-class new business ventures and dissemination of the output of research as widely as possible. The Centre is working on a number of reports including a comparative study of differing approaches to supporting new technology ventures in Europe within the context of the Europe-wide PAXIS project, which is coordinated from Luxembourg.

Peter Hiscocks, the director of the Centre who comes from a business background and has started and run several companies on his own, uses the catch phrase "knowledge-based entrepreneurship" when describing what goes on inside the organization. Hiscocks sees his mission as changing the culture of the university, to encourage scientific academics to start thinking about business as well. He claims that the culture has to change in a way to make it possible and acceptable for professors to start their own businesses based on results of their research. Discouraged in the past, today professorial entrepreneurship is actively encouraged. It is now part of the university's strategy to act on its responsibility to exploit technological know-how in order to enable the creation of new business. In fact, Hiscocks describes Cambridge as having an entrepreneurial culture that is much more akin to the United States than to the rest of Europe. Cambridge has a mobile work force, an acceptance of failure, and a culture of "if you can do it, we like to see you become a success," whereas in certain European countries and other parts in England, the attitude is "oh, you made money, how horrible and dirty." In Cambridge, being successful and earning money are no longer shameful. So Cambridge is "a happening place" for innovation, making it attractive to many entrepreneurs.