Individual innovativeness as a driver of career success: academic techno-experts in an entrepreneurial ecosystem

Abstract

In this chapter, we investigated individual innovativeness as an entrepreneurial activity in an entrepreneurial ecosystem. As a main interest, we examined academic techno-entrepreneurs’ innovativeness in relation to their career success. Thereafter, in a comparative study, we examined whether there were differences in the relationship between innovativeness and career success in three types of sampled academic techno-experts: entrepreneurs, experts considering entrepreneurship and experts not considering entrepreneurship. The proposed models were tested using a SEM-PLS analysis of the survey dataset comprising 423 observations collected from members of the Academic Engineers and Architects in Finland (TEK) trade union. Our results showed that an academic techno-entrepreneur’s innovativeness is strongly and significantly related to her or his career success, that is, career satisfaction and income level. These results are similar for all three types of academic techno-experts. We discuss the implications of our findings and make recommendations for future study.