The Role of Universities in Developing Countries to Support the Creation of High-Tech Start Ups: The Case of Monterrey, Mexico

Abstract

In the last decades, innovation has been regarded by many policy makers, economists, engineers and business managers as a key element to obtain competitive advantage. Developed countries target innovation to maintain their competitiveness and high standard of living. On the other hand, catching up countries look for innovation as a main source to alleviate poverty providing new value added jobs and new products to the global markets. But one main concern in both developed and catching up countries is how to increase the innovation capacity at the national, regional and firm levels. In the last years a growing interest has emerged to understand the role and significance of Universities and research institutions in the Knowledge Based Economy to achieve innovations. Particularly in Mexico, University-industry collaborations are taking place on a regional basis, given the geographic proximity between research institutions and the specific problems related to local natural resources and industrial activities (Casas, 2003). Nevertheless according to the AIHEPS (2005) report, University - Industry collaboration in Mexico is still weak. The Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) one of the biggest private academic institutions in Latin America, was founded in 1943 by a group of businessmen. Since its roots, the ITESM original goal was to teach young Mexicans to provide skills to the local industry. With time, ITESM has also trained students to be entrepreneurs; it is one of the few Universities in Mexico with a course to teach and motivate students since the early stage of their studies to start their own business. Also, it has provided different facilities such as incubators to support the initial stages of the students' business start-up and growth. At the same time, the Centre of Innovation and Technology Transfer (CIT2) has been recently inaugurated to stimulate the development and growth of high tech based companies. One of its goals is to support the transfer of knowledge process among ITESM professors and entrepreneurs taking advantage of the proximity being inside the campus. The objective of this paper is to present the current efforts done by the EGADE business school (Escuela de Graduados en Administracion de Empresas) of ITESM to enable the development of new high tech businesses in Monterrey. Case studies of three successful high tech start-ups will be presented where the Business School of ITESM (EGADE) has played an important role training and guiding entrepreneurs to launch new high tech start-ups.