Entrepreneurial Orientations and (Intrinsic/Extrinsic) Motivations to Do Academic Science

• In Event: STEM Graduate Education

Abstract

We contend that the work academic scientists do is entrepreneurial because they are in the business of discovering, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities to create new knowledge. Four entrepreneurial traits seem particularly appropriate when considering academic entrepreneurship: tolerance of ambiguity, optimism, innovativeness, and competitive aggressiveness. In an effort to understand what motivates STEM postdoctoral trainees’ achievements in science, we discover that all four entrepreneurial traits are factors. Our results, based on a survey of 215 postdoctoral trainees in STEM disciplines, shows that tolerance for ambiguity, dispositional optimism, and innovativeness predicting intrinsic motivations to do science and competitive aggressiveness predicting extrinsic ones.

Authors

• Richard Pitt, University of California - San Diego

• Oluchi Nwosu-Randolph, Vanderbilt University