Samantha DeWalt is Managing Director of Lehigh@Nasdaq Center, an exclusive education-industry partnership between Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and the Nasdaq Entrepreneurship Center in San Francisco..
Traditionally, the PhD has been thought of solely as a passport to academic excellence and academic tenure: those who invested the time, energy, and money to obtain a PhD seemed inevitably destined to go into academia, to freely pursue knowledge without commercial intent.
This is the standard basis and training for a PhD: candidates are groomed for a career in academia, where they will research, teach, and publish. This tradition is well-intentioned, but it is in dire need of significant expansion.
Saving research from the “valley of death”
This expansion is already underway: In December, the National Science Foundation awarded $100 million to 18 academic institutions across the country to “accelerate and expand research into products and services that benefit the nation.” The first-ever “Research Translation Acceleration Awards” were created to enable university scholars to translate academic innovations into commercial value and societal purpose. Each awarded school will partner with a leading institution of higher education that already has a “strong ecosystem for translational research.”
Lehigh University is one of the recipients of the aforementioned National Science Foundation award, with Carnegie Mellon University serving as the university's peer mentor. The $6 million award will be specifically allocated to encourage faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to translate scientific discoveries in engineering, science, health, humanities, business, education and other fields into prototypes, products and programs that benefit society.
Meanwhile, with academic job openings struggling to keep up with demand, more PhDs are turning to careers in industry. In 2020, the Princeton Review warned that “if you have ambitions of becoming a professor, you should be aware that a PhD program does not guarantee a life in academia.” So candidates will need to prepare differently.
Don't get me wrong: some university graduates with PhDs turn out to be very enterprising, and it's estimated that the private sector now employs as many PhDs as educational institutions.
According to most studies, between one-third and one-half of PhD graduates worldwide will likely stay in academia, while the rest will move to the private sector. Every day, there are cases of entrepreneurial PhD graduates starting new ventures that ultimately become highly successful. In fact, Forbes It's been reported that “at least” 35 of America's billionaires earned a PhD before going into business.
But let’s face it: academics are rarely trained to be entrepreneurs. They usually focus on conducting research, publishing papers, and sometimes developing intellectual property, but they don’t develop the business knowledge and resources to turn their innovations into practical solutions for the market. It’s a shame that university research is left on the shelf, never reaching the market – the so-called “valley of death.”
How America's top universities are doing it
Universities are stepping up efforts to teach doctoral students how to better utilize their doctorate. At Lehigh, we conducted a competitive analysis to see what other higher education institutions, particularly those highly regarded for entrepreneurial activity, are doing to engage doctoral students in entrepreneurship courses and programs. Universities surveyed included Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Dartmouth College, and UC Berkeley. Overall, our analysis revealed a need—and an opportunity—to transform doctoral education.
More specifically, we found that while most of these top universities offer entrepreneurship education to both graduate and undergraduate students, few offer it to doctoral students. We also found that most graduate programs in entrepreneurship education are offered in business schools or engineering schools, so few are truly interdisciplinary. We also found that doctoral students are more likely to participate in entrepreneurial activities if they are entrepreneurs or at least have a supervisor with an entrepreneurial mindset.
Stanford University in particular stands out as an exemplary entrepreneurial environment for students, benefiting from an education-industry partnership that gives it access to some of Silicon Valley's most innovative companies. The University of California, Berkeley also stands out for its emphasis on interdisciplinary entrepreneurship and close collaboration with nearby startup incubators.
Dartmouth College pioneered the first engineering PhD innovation program to provide entrepreneurial training to turn research findings into market solutions. PhD recipients take additional courses in business, innovation and entrepreneurship and complete an industry internship for up to six months.
Entrepreneurship education should be democratized. Other universities should follow the example of top universities. Every student, even those on a budget, should have access to an Ivy League education.
The university is taking its first steps in this new direction to provide doctoral students with more entrepreneurial experience and career paths. Last fall, the university introduced a hands-on, real-world, interdisciplinary entrepreneurship course for doctoral students. Built on a model designed by the National Science Foundation, the course is offered for credit and is available to graduate students across disciplines through Lehigh@NasdaqCenter in partnership with the PC Rossin College of Engineering and Lehigh's Technology Transfer Office.
It's time for PhD graduates to get serious. More of them should seize the ideas that came out of their studies as entrepreneurial opportunities. But first, they need to know how to put all that valuable education to work for the benefit of both society and the economy.
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