The potential of design to foster academic entrepreneurship: An ethnographic study of metaLAB at Harvard

Purpose- This paper builds upon the notion of academic entrepreneurship as a way to engage with external communities to create value (Kingma 2011) and more specifically analyses how design is used to foster this idea of entrepreneurship in a lab at Harvard in Cambridge, MA. Approach- The study is the result of an ethnographic investigation I conducted across 2013 and 2014. Findings- In the lab analysed, design plays an important role to connect academia with external stakeholders and to sustain interactions through processes of translations, iterative prototyping, co-design. These activities contribute to develop some components of academic entrepreneurship, but also open up questions on how to evaluate this entrepreneurial dimension. Value- The study contributes to the ongoing discussions on how academia can adopt entrepreneurial approaches and reflects upon open issues potentially related to some of these approaches.