2.1. Technology-Based Entrepreneurship

TBE originated in the work of ^{Little (1977)}, who conceived it as independently owned businesses based on the exploitation of an invention or technological innovation by undertaking substantial technological risks for no more than 25 years (^{Little, 1977}). However, this paper addresses TBE as organizations that produce goods and services, oriented to designing, developing, and producing new products and/or innovative manufacturing processes by systematically applying technical and scientific knowledge (^{US Congress Office of Technology Assessment, 1992}).

Research, knowledge, innovation, scaling, and entrepreneurial spirit underpin TBE. It also focuses on customer and user benefits from producing high added value goods and/or services. TBE can be integrated into into an existing company or in a university context through research and development (^{Colciencias, Corporación Ruta N Medellín and Corporación Tecnnova UEE, 2016}). Nevertheless, as specialized knowledge is required, the human factor needs to be better educated and skilled (^{Morales and Castellanos, 2007}).

Knowledge management, as new business models’ essential process to success, affords TBE a leading role as a crucial player for the development of economies since its raison d’etre is to yield innovative products or services based on the applicability of knowledge and immersion in new technologies (^{Morales and Castellanos, 2007}).

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] (2017), in recent years, venture capital investments, both in the United States and Europe, have concentrated in information and communication technologies (ICT) and life sciences; 53.6% and 20.7%, respectively, in the US. In Europe, the ICT sector drew significant venture capital investments (44% of the total), followed by life sciences (27%) (^{OECD, 2017}).

Entrepreneurship is intensely concentrated in the services sector, mediated by easily accessible digital tools and platforms (e-commerce, matchmakers, video-streamings, and crowdfunding). These have begun to harness knowledge intensively, reconfiguring the worldwide business fabric dynamics. This will bring innovative digital and technology-based ventures accelerated development and growth to (^{OECD, 2017}).

In the face of such a global panorama, Latin America is lagging on account of substantial innovation gaps, not only in technological research and development and patents but also in product and process innovation. Even Latin American multinational companies are behind on innovation (^{World Bank, 2014}). The foregoing is partly explained due to broad-scoped innovative entrepreneurship policies’ focus, the weaknesses and gaps in national innovation systems, and the limited attention paid to TBE, failing to acknowledge differentiated needs (^{Kantis and Angelelli, 2020}).

The Colombian panorama is akin to the Latin American, wherefore among the existing challenges is gearing research, technological development, and scientific advancements towards the development and creation of TBE. Although there is an amounting number of startups being created and expanding in Colombia (^{Pérez, 2019}), and entrepreneurship has gained a prominent place in the government’s economic development strategy, which explains why entrepreneurial ecosystems have grown in the country’s main cities (where chambers of commerce, universities, and municipalities participate along with startups incubators, firms venture capital, angel investors and innovation labs (^{GEM, 2020})), innovation-oriented public and private investment falls quite short compared against countries with higher development indexes. According to ^{Lucio-Álvarez, Guevara-Rey, Perea, Garavito-Muñoz, Segura-Sguerra, Ramírez-Sánchez, Romero-Riaño, Cifuentes-Mirke, Castellanos, Zárate-Rincón, Mora-Holguín, Caho-Rodríguez, and Rocha- Gutiérrez (2020)}, investment in science, technology and innovation in Colombia barely reached 0.74% of the 2019 national GDP.

2.2. TBE-HEIs relationship

HEIs are playing a leading role in promoting innovative and technology-based ventures (^{Åstebro, Bazzazian, and Braguinsky, 2012}) since they have understood that efforts should be focused on promoting the spin-offs that build on research projects results and on seeing themselves as innovation centers intertwined with other actors in the entrepreneurial ecosystem to which they belong. A more open posture towards developing companies mediated by knowledge and the use of digital technologies is sought out (^{Kantis and Angelelli, 2020}).

Lately, HEIs have undertaken the third mission as societal agents of change, the so-called outreach and/or social projection (^{Bueno, 2007}). This way, HEIs have the opportunity to project knowledge generated towards society through the development of enterprises based on scientific-technological advancements, which favors the emergence of new TBEs (^{Gómez, 2019}).

In fact, TBEs as productive units might be the way to boost productivity and, therefore, the government policies work in favor of promoting the third HEIs mission. Furthermore, they encourage university-company-state-civil society relationships, which are conducive to employment generation and social cohesion (^{Clark, 1998}; ^{Howard and Sharma, 2006}; ^{Cimoli et al., 2010}; ^{Fichter and Tiemann, 2018}; ^{Gómez, 2019}).

Regarding the Colombian context, legally speaking, it is essential to highlight that ^{Law 1014 of 2006} fosters a culture of entrepreneurship. Also, the National Entrepreneurship Policy was enacted in 2009, which seeks to simplify creation procedures, improved access to financed capital, and support counseling services for entrepreneurs. Likewise, Law 1838 of 2017 seeks to promote “science, technology and innovation through the creation of technology-based companies (Spin-off)” (^{Law 1838, 2017}). Said Law also wants public or private HEIs to generate technology-based ventures, also known as spin-offs, derived from research projects, where researchers, teachers, students, and other actors are strongly encouraged by exploiting their outputs.

The Colombian regulatory framework is conducive to TBE advancement at the level of HEIs and can be an alternative for them to bring about tax revenues and technology businesses capable of international competition (^{Rasmussen and Wright, 2015}). However, per ^{Gómez (2019)}, HEIs resources need strengthening and boosting to develop and promote a TBE culture. Along these lines, ^{Hernández, Álvarez, Blanco, and Carvajal (2013)} argue that there are gaps or little clarity regarding economic rights and intellectual property concerning the development of TBE. Also, researchers, teachers, students, and other interested parties face challenges in avoiding conflicts of interest regarding the economic interests of these ventures.

Framed therein, TBEs carry a close relationship with HEIs because their definition explicitly lies in exploiting scientific-technological knowledge in favor of the generation of products or services. That does not mean that other knowledge-intensive organizations do not exploit their intangible resources in this same way. Therefore, HEIs, on account of their raison d’être, must harness their resources to foster the entrepreneurial spirit, strengthen relationships with companies and create alliances to boost their intangible resources in favor of TBE.

3.1. The Universidad del Valle and the regionalization system: a case study

The Universidad del Valle is a regional-scope public higher education institution in western Colombia, headquartered in Santiago de Cali and it has eight regional facilities in Valle del Cauca in Caicedonia, Zarzal, Cartago, Tuluá, Buga, Buenaventura, Yumbo, Palmira and a facility in the department of Cauca, specifically in Santander de Quilichao. The regional facilities make up the regionalization system that historically has been more teaching-oriented, the contributions of which are noteworthy concerning professional and technologists’ training. The University has in place an internal policy to promote entrepreneurship based on its outreach and social projection axes¹. However, despite a long history and relevance, the high-value entrepreneurship promotion policy has yielded differentiated results. It has failed to significantly advance entrepreneurship regionally speaking, even though the university’s various facilities are located in subregions with high potential for business development and creation.

Entrepreneurship is enshrined in the “Institutional Entrepreneurs Program” (IEP) created on December 12, 2005, and enacted under Resolution No. 073, the purpose of which is to strengthen students’ entrepreneurial potential through the development of skills to conceive, plan and launch new for-profit or non-profit, self-managed, collective or associative organizations (Table 1).

Although the Cali headquarters have seen some progress in implementing the entrepreneurship policy, yielding results in pre-incubation, support in incubation processes; also, a range of complementary courses have been developed. At the regional facilities, the offer of entrepreneurship courses is at the programs’ coordinator’s office discretion, and it is alliances with external initiatives such as the ValleInn program² and the different local entrepreneurship networks that mainly support entrepreneurship, primarily oriented towards validated and ongoing ventures.

In particular, the case study focused on the Palmira campus, which offers majors such as Business Administration, Public Accounting, Industrial Engineering, Systems Technology, Food Technology, Electronics Technology, Agro-environmental Technology, Agroforestry Technology, Technology in Logistics Management, Technology in Mobility and Road Safety, Technology in Maintenance of Electromechanical Systems, Technology in Welded Constructions, Psychology, Bachelor’s Degree in Physical Education, Bachelor’s Degree in Literature and Diploma Courses and Workshops. Concerning postgraduate studies, the facility offers a Master’s Degree in Project Management. Entrepreneurship at the facility has benefited from its articulation with the I +³ Entrepreneurship Network. Nevertheless, a large share of the results in entrepreneurship from this regional facility come from individual initiatives, wherefore there is no historical documentation, records in the institutional platforms and systems, information on the undertaking’s evolution, or management indicators that enable traceability over time.

3.2. Methods

The methodological strategy followed a qualitative, exploratory, and descriptive approach. A World Café was implemented for primary-source information gathering purposes. Ten professors in charge of academic programs at the HEI subject matter hereof, who have been in university teaching for more than 15 years, participated, thus contributing to a broad and holistic outlook of the entrepreneurial landscape from an interdisciplinary perspective.

According to ^{Brown and Isaacs (2006)}, the world café is a technique devised to allow the people who will be the subjects of a study to make connections between concepts, ideas, and people, thus fostering active listening, respect, participation, and the creation of knowledge to be shared through working in small groups gathered around thematic tables. During the world café exercise, the participants switched conversation groups to partake in all conversations, make contributions, and build knowledge through their knowledge and experiences, based on thematic axes and guiding questions (Table 2).

Each participant answered the guiding questions on post-it notes and classified them as strengths, weakness, opportunity, or threat in a matrix and according to their criteria. Subsequently, the information collected was systematized, analyzed, and cross-referenced to establish the enabling factors. The content analysis technique was employed for the approach. It allows extracting the meaningful message from the qualitative information collected (^{Aktouf, 2001}; ^{Abela, 2002}; ^{Cáceres, 2008})

4.1. Professors’ perspective on TBE in HEIs being studied

The world café made it possible to identify the professors’ thoughts on TBE for the case study. For teachers, institutional strengths are evident in the teaching body because of their trajectory or experience in research and the installed capacity of laboratories and equipment. They also accounted for weaknesses such due to the lack of a research agenda, a high-value entrepreneurship culture, since the emphasis has been placed on subsistence entrepreneurship (traditional approach), and the lack of financing during early stages, among other things. Regarding opportunities, the teachers referred to technological programs, global economic trends, the local entrepreneurial ecosystem, among other things. The threats are in the form of the lack of continuity in the facility’s institutional commitment to entrepreneurship and the lack of a budget for implementation of an entrepreneurship unit, among others (Table 3).

The participants in the world café hold the provision of a battery of processes and laboratories for experimentation and research in the field of chemistry, biology, food, and electronics as a strength. Regarding simulators, the institution has some simulated modeling and experimentation software; however, these are not exclusive to the facility. For its part, human resources are also regarded as a strength. The teachers’ profiles show cutting-edge knowledge compatible with the scientific-technological advancements trending worldwide. However, the participants sustain human resource tenure, and stability is a weakness due to institutional liaisoning, which prevents long-term undertakings.

The participants identified the generation of ideas (ideation process and creativity) as a potential and, therefore, a strength. They also remind of consolidated business-experienced entrepreneurs who have gained experiences and knowledge, which could be a motivator.

The offer of entrepreneurship-oriented courses is an institutional strength as they are transversal to the academic programs. Nevertheless, some weaknesses include unsustainability in the programs’ offer, limited development in entrepreneurship as a transversal axis across academic curricula, unlinked pedagogical strategies (casuistry), and the absence of training models in experiential entrepreneurship, where the master class and the traditional evaluation predominate.

Concerning opportunities, the participants spoke of nine technologists’ programs focused on practical knowledge as attested in their micro-curricula; the weakness stems from the fact that entrepreneurship is not involved to complement the disciplinary component. Moreover, even though most teachers are real sector-experienced, which transcends the entrepreneurial itself, they fall short in involving topics such as innovation and business creation in their lectures.

Another strength the participants identified is the “entrepreneurial institutional program,” which supports “outreach and social projection” within the frame of the institution’s third missio goal, where a pathway for entrepreneurship is laid out. Regarding the case study, activities to promote entrepreneurship are evident; however, these do not fall under an agenda or work plan in articulation with the aforementioned program, which has shed light on a weakness. Furthermore, no resources have been allocated so as to maintain and sustain a detailed medium- and long-term program or plan framed within the program in question.

TBE culture-supporting alliances, agreements, or networks that might arise are among the opportunities the participants identified. In this regard, the regional facility is participating in a local entrepreneurship network in articulation with other higher education institutions, public institutions, and government agencies, which allows learning about events, training, and affords seed capital through prizes and contests, among other things. In addition, the need to build a database of entrepreneurs from the facility was made evident in the search for adding value to all actions implemented.

Other weaknesses the participants pointed out are the lack of an entrepreneur services-specialized office, decoupling between academic programs and laboratories, and the non-existence of a laboratory specialized in ideation, creativity, and design thinking that allows entrepreneurs to take their first steps in the path of entrepreneurship, prototyping, modeling, simulation running, market assessment, etc. Additionally, human resources are lacking to operationalize the entrepreneurial path laid down. There is no centralized monitoring of those activities carried out within the academic programs, which recurrently occur in isolation but are intended on generating a culture of entrepreneurship. The preceding also carries implications for curriculums and the teachers’ initiatives within their academic freedoms.

The participants maintain that leadership and direction are discontinuous processes because different types of leadership have come to pass in the last five years, influencing medium- and short-term entrepreneurship-focused actions. They further state that the facility has yet to implement an entrepreneurship policy; there only records of individual actions undertaken by teachers from the programs attached to administration to be found. Leadership credibility needs to be fostered in terms of monitoring the undertaking’s program or agenda, which must pursue articulation with the institutional entrepreneurs’ program.

Regarding student-developed academic work, disconnectedness among programs was exposed, despite sharing the same university campus. The participants explain that this difficulty is underpinned by the lack of an agenda that links curricular and extracurricular activities. Furthermore, they suggest that the students’ entrepreneurial ventures, most often traditional, need to be interrelated with academic programs.

Another weakness coming to light was the lack of systematized experiences and the management of entrepreneurship-related information, essential for knowledge visibility, dissemination, and apprehension. Concerning research as a primary factor to advance TBE development, the participants sustain that research activities have been centralized at the university’s headquarters.

A potential opportunity is the scheduling of extracurricular activities that afford techniques, tools and generate TBE-oriented competencies. The stakeholders participating in the collaborative exercise mention the necessity to regularly and actively disseminate activities favoring TBE, which must be institutional as fundamental to fostering a sense of belonging. To that end, they maintain that it is a strength that the institution has strong and highly well-known institutional social networks.

Finally, when asked about the impact on the IDIC, the participants spoke of several weaknesses: lack of knowledge on trending new business models (e.g., the convergence of technologies and emerging companies), lack of knowledge of Colombia’s path and policy for creating spin-off companies, regulations on intellectual property, proprietary rights, the university’s methods for knowledge and technology transferring, and the way for reporting innovations and technological development.

4.2. Enabling factors to promote a TBE culture

Based on an analysis of the world café output and the content analysis, different enabling factors came to light, which HEIs with limited experience in entrepreneurship must address in order to develop a TBE-oriented culture. The first enabling factor is HEIs’ senior management strategic vision for promoting TBE to pursue a hard-felt impact on society. Therefore, HEIs’ strategic and operational planning and TBE need to conflate through strategies encompassing all facilities and academic programs. Likewise, it is necessary to set verifiable goals and indicators to assess the policies and actions implemented over time.

Another enabling factor is TBE being incorporated into research, development, and innovation processes. It is relevant in this field that HEIs’ research agendas encompass cutting-edge scientific and technological components (e.g., collaborative economy, bio-businesses, and technological convergence) and that the development of EBT is encouraged (^{Cimoli et al., 2010}). Likewise, exciting developments and leveraging could be found, such as intellectual property, proprietary rights, and innovation reporting, among other things.

The creation of entrepreneurship units that include an actual space on the university campus (ideation and creativity laboratory) and highly trained personnel in business creation is another enabling factor. Additionally, it is relevant for each HEI to create a database of its entrepreneurial community to record experiences, follow-up, and dissemination, leading to the recognition and improvement of its goodwill (^{Klofsten, Fayolle, Guerrero, Mian, Urbano, and Wright, 2019}).

Infrastructure, equipment provision, and investing in tangible resources to conduct laboratories, workshops, and experimentation are other enabling factors, and adequate resource allocation to that end is considered essential. Such investments should be partly geared towards providing a laboratory for ideation and creativity, a space for the university community the external sector convergence to address productive projects. Additionally, it is advisable to invest in simulators and tools to conduct design thinking (^{Fichter and Tiemann, 2018}).

Another enabling factor is teachers’ training in entrepreneurship and innovation. According to ^{Kantis and Angelelli (2020)}, teachers’ and researchers’ lack of training in entrepreneurship hinders entrepreneurship since the lack of a training methodology that harnesses technological tools and encourages putting theoretical knowledge into practice hinders entrepreneurship skills training(^{Mayorga, 2016}).

HEIs’ investment in human resources should primarily focus on retaining personnel based on qualifications that support TBE activities and promotion. Likewise, teachers’ role as liaison agents with students plays a fundamental part in promoting a multidisciplinary base framework that favors entrepreneurship. The offer of courses that promote entrepreneurship should be transversal and focused on creativity, innovation, research, and, above all, strengthening problem-solving, teamwork and leadership skills, and resilience. Likewise, those HEIs must strengthen and increase in implementation, monitoring, and dissemination and establish initiatives such as mixers, business fairs, science fairs, competitions, or contests among the institution’s academic programs or other HEIs in the entrepreneurial ecosystem to raise awareness of entrepreneurship. The foregoing agrees with ^{Pérez’s (2019)} explanation, where he argues that TBE occurs in the midst of strategic alliances with key actors.

Another enabling factor is HEIs’ relationship with the agents that promote entrepreneurship; therefore, there must be continued articulation and ties with the interest groups in the entrepreneurial ecosystem: universities, NGOs, private sector, government, technology parks, etc. This relationship needs to create framework agreements, develop alliances and networks, and, of course, set up communication strategies that help disseminate them across all components of said ecosystem.

The enabling factors above coincide with the perspective of ^{Mayorga (2016)}. This author posits the need to articulate all the actors into the training process and courses, contents, and transversal topics proposed for entrepreneurs’ didactic and curricular training, create technological resources for greater apprehension and stimulate the participants’ cognitive and volitional learning with the support of business simulators, and to host spaces that foster company-focused interaction between students, entrepreneurs and government entities, seeking to strengthen the entrepreneurial culture as supported by incubators to materialize innovative business ideas.

Finally, it should be noted that fostering a culture for TBE requires HEIs to harness resources significantly; therefore, their human resources must fall under a unified perception of TBE and the requirements for its creation. This also becomes an incentive for HEIs because the worldwide recognition for developing this kind of company due to research and scientific, technological advancements puts HEIs on the radar, together with the science-technology-innovation system betting on these developments.