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View all search resultsUniversities may be killing their innovators softly
We are witnessing a "soft kill" of university innovators, not by policy, but by a measurement system that renders entrepreneurial labor invisible. It’s time to move toward a differentiated academic career path.
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Greener pastures: People attend a forum on applying for colleges and universities in the United States on Aug. 12, 2012, at the US Embassy’s cultural center @america inside Pacific Place Mall in South Jakarta. (AFP/Romeo Gacad)
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fter six years embedded in university-based entrepreneurship programs, a troubling pattern has become impossible to ignore. The lecturers who shoulder the heavy lifting of a campus’s entrepreneurial mission, building ventures with students, opening industry networks and navigating the messy reality of failed projects, are rarely visible when formal academic evaluations take place.
These individuals are the heartbeat of incubators and venture studios. They mentor students through market rejection, pivots and the crushing weight of uncertainty. They build an institution’s external credibility through daily labor that no glossy brochure could ever manufacture. Yet, when promotion cycles arrive and academic credits are calculated, their entrepreneurial labor is virtually non-existent on the record.
What consistently appears are journal publications, formal teaching loads and community service reports. What remains largely absent are the companies built, the industry ecosystems assembled, or the years spent absorbing risk alongside learners.
To be clear, by innovators, I do not mean inventors or researchers working in laboratories. Many valuable inventions never leave the lab. Innovation begins only when invention meets commercialization, when ideas reach paying customers.
Not every inventor becomes an innovator. This article speaks specifically to those who carry the burden of commercialization within the university walls.
Over time, it has become evident that this friction cannot be fixed by individual effort; the fault lies in how the system measures merit. Publishing more requires stepping away from ventures. Sustaining ventures weakens academic standing.
There is no combination of personal adjustments that can reconcile this conflict because the evaluation system has no slot for entrepreneurial labor.
