curriculum might make the image of the scientist more attractive to high-school students choosing between, say, economics and physics (a key concern in the science community); and
• increase the proportion of science students opting for employment in the private and public sectors instead of careers in academic research (a key concern in industry).
What happened at Leiden was part of a nationwide 1998 covenant between the Ministry of Education, Dutch industry and the Dutch universities. By virtue of the covenant, a fifth year of every mathematics or science student’s support was guaranteed on condition that the science curricula were broadened in all universities through the inclusion of courses on non-scientific subjects appropriate to the students’ future social and economic roles.
The challenge for all modern economies is to
accelerate their rate of innovation in technology-based businesses. As is made clear elsewhere in this special issue, a minimum requirement in this context is that science and business are brought closer together, and it therefore follows that it is desirable to educate people so that they can operate comfortably in both environments. Although the Science Based Business (SBB) elective, established in 2001 at Leiden University in the Netherlands, is most likely to build capacity for innovation among science students, the programme was not originally established to serve this purpose. Rather, it was set up to:
• counter the decline in the number of science students choosing mathematics/science programmes – it was thought that the inclusion of a programme on business in the science
Science-based business
studies at Leiden
University
Harmen Jousma
Abstract: The Science Based Business (SBB) programme was established at Leiden University in 2001 in an effort to counter the unidirectional professionalism of students in science studies – not explicitly to meet the needs of business and industry. Nor is SBB a stand-alone Master’s programme like the MS/MBA or the PSM in the USA: rather, it is designed to be an elective in all Leiden’s research Master’s programmes. It attracts both those students who want to stay on to study for a PhD and those who seek an occupation outside fundamental research. Especially pertinent to building capacity for innovation is the new course, ‘Orientation on Technopreneurship’, which is taught alongside the SBB programme. Because career opportunities for SBB and OOT graduates are diverse, the organizers have avoided an industry-specific focus in both cases.
Keywords: technopreneurship; science-based business; M-Variant Dr Jousma is Director of the Science Based Business (SBB) programme at Leiden University, Niels Bohrweg 1, 2333 CA Leiden, the Netherlands. E-mail: jousma@sbb. leidenuniv.nl. Website: www.sbb.leidenuniv.nl.
Despite some attempts at coordination all the universities, and in some cases individual science departments within the same university, made their own choices as to how to respond to the Ministry’s covenant, and what to call their new programmes. Many are simply called ‘M-Variant’.1 In Leiden the decision was
taken to focus on business and management, and to offer the same programme for mathematics and science students across all departments. Groningen and Utrecht Universities developed corresponding programmes. The physics department at the University of Technology in Delft, on the other hand, chose not to provide a specific programme for its science students: instead, students in physics at Delft can elect to participate in a variety of courses for business students at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam.
With hindsight, more significant even than the explicit justification for the new covenant’s insistence on the M-Variant was the finding that a considerable number of science graduates had themselves complained about their faculty’s single-minded emphasis on academic research. Surveys revealed that students in general found research uninspiring, ill matched to their talents, and adding little value to the career they wished to pursue (Van Duijn and Jousma, 1999). Even some PhD alumni indicated that they might have benefited from an introductory course or courses on management and business. The real purpose, then, of the SBB programme and of a related course at Leiden entitled ‘Orientation on Technopreneurship’ (OOT) was and is to prepare students more fully for a wider variety of future careers. Thus specific goals, such as improving the economy by accelerating the rate of innovation, are secondary to the programme’s purpose. It is presumed that when talented science graduates find a suitable place in the economy the nation will benefit overall.
In summary, the Science Based Business programme at Leiden was set up without any specific presumption as to what students might do after graduation. The findings of the surveys mentioned above, regarding what employers and, especially, science graduates who made their careers outside science thought would be useful, also led to the conclusion that the prospects for Leiden’s students were diverse. This diversity is reflected in Figure 1, which illustrates the various directions that science graduates’ initial careers actually take. A further consideration (again arising from the survey research cited above) is that work attitude and personal skills are as important to non-academic employers as technical expertise. Employers and alumni acknowledge that science students need specific training in: people-handling skills; the non-science issues of marketing a technical product; and working
with time and budget constraints in a profit-oriented enterprise. Also important to employers is that science students learn how scientific knowledge is applied in practice by doing instead of listening to lectures.
The SBB programme
All these considerations contributed to the structure of the programme, which includes an introduction to business fundamentals in the context of science-based products and activities, along with a focus on developing personal skills and work-appropriate attitudes. In addition, SBB requires students to gain real-world experience by carrying out work or a management-oriented project in a company. Thus the programme has two main elements:
• a twelve-week full-time course in ‘SBB Fundamentals’; and
• an internship in a company for four to six months. ‘SBB Fundamentals’ comprises four integrated modules. Two of these introduce the business disciplines ‘Strategic Marketing Management’ and ‘Financial Management’, chosen because they are important to virtually any organization, regardless of its nature (even non-profit and governmental organizations have to understand how they position themselves vis-à-vis other organizations and/or agencies and how to finance and control their operations). A third module, threaded through the whole course, consists of ‘Selected Topics’, each of which is covered in about three full days. One involves a business game; others address ‘Innovation’, ‘Introduction to Law’ and ‘Patents and Human Resource Management’. Finally, about halfway through the twelve-week course the module in ‘Project Management’ begins, introducing the managerial aspects of setting up and executing a Figure 1. Examples of the very different directions other than (fundamental) research that science students’ careers actually take.
project. The module ends with the writing of a project plan for the further development and marketing of a science-based product. The project plan integrates many of the subjects that have been taught during the course.
Embedded in all components of the SBB programme are group assignments and presentations by students specifically designed to enhance their communication skills. Students are also interested in learning more about the opportunities the labour market has to offer, so alumni are invited back to tell their stories – what they are doing now, how they got to their current position and how they are managing their careers more generally. Recruitment agencies also participate by providing an overview of the current job market and offering training in résumé writing and job interviews.
Overall, the SBB instructors try to structure their courses and modules to reflect the modalities common to business (as against academic) education. This is achieved through the problem orientation and case-based approach of the courses. At the same time, what distinguishes SBB from an ordinary business training programme is the fact that the problems and cases are science-based and located in a technology-based organizational context – and, of course, that all the students have a science background.
The internship
The basic requirement for an internship is that the activities concerned are at a level comparable to what would be expected of a science graduate entering the labour market. Ideally, the assignment will specifically involve science or technology: recent examples have been the coordination of clinical research, the management of space projects and corporate finance in biotechnology. There would, however, be no objections if an SBB student managed to obtain an internship in a major consultancy firm such as McKinsey & Co or Bain, whatever the specific assignment. The important thing is that the internship should be non-academic in nature – that it does not involve, in other words, studies that must conform to the usual academic standards. Detailed reporting on the content of the internship activities is not required.
A clear advantage of this design is that students can be assigned to confidential projects and their activities are not fixed, but can change throughout the internship as the project or assignment evolves. The only ‘academic’ requirement is that the student should spend a small portion (about 15%) of his or her time in mastering background knowledge: for an internship with an investment bank, for example, the student may need to learn more about company valuation.
The contents of the background study are determined in consultation with the supervisor at the company sponsoring the internship. This brings in an additional mechanism to enhance the efficacy of the internship, both for the internship provider and the student.
As previously noted, SBB is not a stand-alone programme, but an elective in the research Master’s programmes of all science curricula at Leiden University. Figure 2 illustrates the distribution across the science disciplines of the 223 students who have so far enrolled. Currently, about 30% of all science Master’s students at Leiden elect to do the ‘SBB Fundamentals’ course and about half of these also opt for an internship in a company.
‘Orientation on Technopreneurship’ (OOT)
Although the general SBB programme is not especially geared to innovation, we anticipate that SBB graduates will be well positioned to contribute to innovative products and processes. Science is the source of invention, and invention becomes productive only when scientists (or science-trained professionals of the kind Leiden is producing) are able to spot and develop innovative opportunities embedded in scientific findings (Jensen and Thursby, 2001). To introduce science students to the full range of issues involved in start-ups, and with a grant from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, in 2001 we set up a course entitled ‘Orientation on Technopreneurship’ (OOT) for SBB students and others at Leiden. No one believes that the typical SBB graduate will start up a company immediately after graduation. In life sciences in the Netherlands, fewer than 10% of scientists starting companies are under 35 years old (Dutch Biopartner Network, 2005). But since SBB attracts both future PhDs and students intending to find a career outside (fundamental) research, an entrepreneurship course is highlyappropriate – for the future PhD researchers because it will increase their ability to appraise research results with regard to any potential commercial application, and for the other students because it will help to
Figure 2. Distribution across science disciplines of the 223 students who enrolled in the SBB programme.
prepare them for jobs in technology transfer, licensing and project management, as well as company start-up.
OOT comprises two modules which can also be taken separately. The ‘Business Planning’ module requires students to develop a business plan based on the research and patents of local Leiden University research groups. The other module, ‘Entrepreneurial Management’, was inspired by the European
Entrepreneurship Colloquium for Participant Centered Learning at Harvard Business School2 and is based
on cases selected to illustrate issues involved in technology transfer and in setting up technology-based ventures.
The number of students electing to take the OOT course has so far been limited to about twenty per year. Many of these students are not from the Netherlands, or even Europe, but from other continents. This is in line with the finding that Europeans on the whole are not oriented towards starting new ventures, which has led to the European Commission’s proposals to ‘enhance the entrepreneurial spirit in the European educational system’ (European Commission, 2006). Current developments at Leiden University’s Bio-Science Park, where the Science Faculty is located, suggest that there will be an increasing interest in entrepreneurial education. One indicator of this is the increased demand for students wanting to undertake internships in relatively young, entrepreneurial companies; another is the recent establishment of an organization, Leiden University Research and Innovation Services, to promote technology transfer at Leiden University. To prepare our science students more fully for such opportunities, we plan to introduce a new special track called ‘Knowledge Capitalization’: adding to the basic elements of the SBB programme, its core content will cover technology transfer, business development and entrepreneurship.
Knowledge capitalization
It is generally acknowledged that there is an
increasingly important role for scientists and science-trained professionals in generating innovation. Without their involvement, discoveries are unlikely to find their way to market. At the same time, there is an associated need for collaborative input from people with a business background. One reason for this is obvious: business professionals will always have significantly greater skills in bringing new products to market than scientists, even if the scientists have studied on a business training programme. Second, there is the issue of demand and supply: while the number and proportion of European science students have declined, the demand of the research community has intensified. Any number of science students leaving science for business careers will drain an already diminished talent pool. The earlier involvement of business people and students in initiatives to generate science-based innovations may help to relax this tension. At the same time, the number of business students who are interested in science-based business is rather small: business graduates tend to be attracted to mainstream areas like marketing and finance – and if they have a weak understanding of science they will not play an important role in spotting and seizing opportunities. Differences in culture and ways of thinking also inhibit cooperation, enhancing the ignoti nulla cupida
effect. To an extent this may be the consequence of an educational system that, from the early years in secondary school, encourages unidirectional professionalism in students.3
Of course, the above observations are not new. In the context of business planning in particular, ‘sandwich programmes’ have been established in which science and business students work together on developing science-based or technology-based
opportunities. Whether these will adequately fill the gap is not yet clear. The implementation of the Bologna Agreement in Europe, which involves a segmentation of the five-year first degree into a three-year Bachelor’s and two-year Master’s, may provide more elaborate means of introducing the basic principles of science to business students in the context of science-based innovation. Figure 3 describes what a two-year Master’s programme on knowledge capitalization intended for both business and science students studying together might look like. Such a programme might meet the growing need in science-based industries for business graduates (in place of scientists) who can handle marketing and (new) business development (Beudeker, 2006). For such a programme, preference in admissions would be given to business students with an avowed interest in and talent for science. After all, the decreasing number of science students is due not to a lack of science talent, but to the fact that a considerable number of students with such talent are choosing economics and business. For science faculty members, co-organizing and teaching such a programme would be one additional way of taking responsibility for the science-based innovation process.
In summary, while it is important to educate science students and scientists such that they can participate in an innovation economy, it may be just as rewarding
and even more efficient to prepare business students to accelerate innovation in partnership with science.
Notes
1‘M’ stands for a number of relevant Dutch words that begin
with that letter, the most important of which is maatschappij – the equivalent of ‘society’ in English.
2For further information, see the Website of the European
Foundation for Entrepreneurial Research (www.efer.nl).
3Much to our surprise, in our programme we even find
considerable ‘cultural’ differences between students from closely related disciplines, such as biology and biomedical sciences, which it seems can be attributed only to the way in which they have been educated and trained in the Bachelor’s programme.
References
Beudeker, Rob, DSM, Delft, personal communication. Dutch Biopartner Network (2005),The Netherlands Life
Sciences Sector Report 2005: New Challenges Ahead, Biopartner, Ede.
EC (2006), ‘Commission tables plan to promote business spirit in schools and universities’, Press Release IP/06/148, European Commission, 13 February. Jensen, R., and Thursby, M. (2001), ‘Proofs and prototypes
for sale: the licensing of university inventions’, American Economic Review,Vol 91, pp 240–259.
Van Duijn, G., and Jousma, H. (1999), Verslag van de Enquête ter toetsing van de ratio, haalbaarheid en inhoud van een Bèta-Management variant, ICLON Report No 64, Leiden University, Leiden.
