Shedding Light on Early Stage Academic Entrepreneurship : Finnish University Researchers' View on Key Stakeholder Relations and Their Influence on the Research Commercialization Process

Since the mid-1980s, along with the opening up of the Finnish economy, the pressure to commercialize university research has steadily increased in Finland. This is in line with the growing importance of innovations in an ever-globalizing world in which purely production- cost-based strategies are about to become obsolete. However, in comparison to other Nordic countries and Western European industrial countries, Finnish investments in research have fallen short in their ability to increase high-technology export levels (Kotiranta and Tahvanainen 2018). Moreover, Finnish academia faces challenges in creating university-based economic activity (Nikulainen and Tahvanainen 2013). In order to help to understand these challenges, this article examines the phenomenon within the context of an entrepreneurial ecosystem according to which various stakeholders are involved in the birth and development of university-based economic activity. As prior research has mainly taken a macrolevel view of the stakeholders involved, we aim at extending the extant research by adopting a qualitative, microlevel approach. More specifically, we provide a qualitative analysis of interviews with Finnish scientists, focusing on their experiences in stakeholder relations at the early stages of academic commercialization. Our article provides an overview of the different stakeholders and their involvement and exposes the opportunities and possible pitfalls taking place within these different stakeholder relations. We offer a critical examination of the current support mechanisms and propose ideas for how academic entrepreneurship in Finnish universities could be enhanced through closer stakeholder collaboration.