Representating Barriers to Academic Entrepreneurship and Knowledge Commercialization at University of Tehran

Many researchers have emphasized on the importance of knowledge commercialization for universities’ survival. Also the process of commercial exploitation of universities’ intellectual properties and academic entrepreneurship often is confronted with some problems and barriers that should be identified and eliminated. Hence in this paper, we try to identify the main barriers to this process in Tehran University, using expert consultation. According to results of this survey, “Bureaucracy and inflexibility of university’s management system” and “lack of networks and communications among academians, industrialist and investors”, were identified as the most important barriers to knowledge commercialization in this university from expert’s viewpoint. Other barriers including “cultural differences between academians and industrialists”, “weakness of intellectual property rights in national level”, “dependency of university to the governmental budgets”, “lack of university awareness from needs and preferences of business sector” and “lack of university’s motivation for commercialization” were placed in subsequent ranks. Finally, we suggested several university and government-oriented improvements in order to eliminate these barriers.