The growth and well-being of societies depend partly on the ability of science to answer the problems that each society faces, both at a collective and individual level. The solutions to societal issues, be technical, economic, political, and environmental, can be provided through various means. One of these means is the transfer of knowledge and technology by researchers, known as 'academic entrepreneurship.' Thus, the latter would be researchers who, in addition to researching, engage in an entrepreneurship process of transferring the results of their research to society in the form of start-ups or spin-offs.
Entrepreneurship has often been intrinsically associated with capitalist values, portrayed in movies where ambitious scientists prioritize greedy pecuniary goals and do not care whether their actions' outcomes are detrimental to society. However, previous research has shown, on the one hand, that scientists have intrinsic value-laden motivations to engage in these ventures or relationships other than pecuniary reasons. On the other hand, different strands of research have suggested that women researchers do not engage in innovation activities because, among other reasons, these activities are tied to notions of masculinity that are also portrayed in movies where entrepreneurs are mainly men who
Most studies of science have given an account of researchers' entrepreneurial behavior in a compartmentalized way, that is, without taking into account researchers' other social worlds. Researchers belong to multiple social worlds, where other (un)gendered idiosyncratically hierarchized, both societal and individual values come to co-exist and thus guide their goals. Researchers, thus, set other simultaneous personal and professional goals, such as family care, which, depending on myriad situated factors and socially gendered prescriptive roles, may be prioritized over entrepreneurial goals.
The main goal of this project is to explain why women and men researchers (dis)engage in entrepreneurship over time by considering their value-laden motivations, their gendered stereotypes of entrepreneurship, their epistemic practices, the reward system they belong to, their type of research, their beliefs about the goals of science, the entrepreneurial culture of the institutions they belong to, and their personal and professional situations. A secondary goal of this project is to investigate whether movies can be used to reflect on gendered beliefs of academic entrepreneurship and thus help to disrupt these beliefs.
