How Does a Researcher Become an Entrepreneur in the High-Tech Industrial Cluster? A Case Study

In the past few decades, the high-tech industrial cluster, as well as the science and technology park, played an important role in promoting research and industry cooperation and enhancing the technology commercialization in many places around the world. It has been pointed out by Saxenian that the interaction between universities and the research institutes and the enterprises in industrial clusters is a primary driver for the growth of Silicon Valley (Saxenian 1996). Feldman (1994) insisted that the innovativeness of high-tech industry relies to a large extent on the basic researches, which are largely taken by the R&D activities of government lab or universities. The enterprises’ geographic proximity to universities and technology institutes enable the rapid knowledge and technology transfer. Therefore, high-tech enterprises prefer to agglomerate near universities and technology institutes, in order to benefit from the knowledge spillover, while researchers began to transform themselves into high-tech entrepreneurs.