Christopher Thomas Scott, PhD, from Stanford’s Center on Biomedical Ethics, will discuss his work on the ethics of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship has been hailed as an important engine for economic growth, productivity, innovation, and employment. In higher education, entrepreneurship programs have become one the fastest-growing field of study on campus. These new initiatives signal exciting times for the modern research university. But they also bring new social and ethical complexities. The ethics literature does not
fully examine how academic entrepreneurs use ethical reasoning in their decision making, specifically, the question of what makes an ethical entrepreneur.

The academic entrepreneur operates in an uncharted ethical space. On closer examination, what might we find here? This talk will describe the results of a pilot study designed to capture how key ethical principles and values are defined and used by different actors at the academic-industry interface, and offer ideas for a framework to guide academic entrepreneurs through the process of commercialization.

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