The number of students who wish to learn about entrepreneurship and actively engage in entrepreneurial activities - either by creating their own companies or by spurring innovation within a large organization - has grown greatly in recent years. Motivating engineers and scientists to become entrepreneurial has particular appeal in light of the abundance of technological knowledge that lurks hidden in today's research institutes and technology-based enterprises, waiting for commercialization.

However the expanding number of teaching programs fail to address the particular challenges and opportunities or starting up viable businesses based on science and engineering.

Nurturing Science-based Ventures: An International Case Perspective presents case studies of more than 30 businesses in scientific fields such as biotechnology, biomedicine, high-tech engineering and information technology. The case studies are arranged in modules tracking the typical life cycle of creating and growing new ventures. The book is a value-adding teaching device that will greatly enhance the learning experience of future high-tech entrepreneurs. The case studies will also foster a general appreciation of technological venturing among current and future business leaders.

Module topics include recognizing and evaluating opportunities, creating viable business plans, securing financial resources, managing growth and eventually harvesting the value created. The view of large firms is also taken into account, with studies on corporate entrepreneurship and the integration of internal and external knowledge to successfully seize business opportunities. Each module of the book is completed by atopic primer and a concluding summary of key learning points.

Case studies include: Google, Logitech, adidas, Ducati, EndoArt, 4M Technologies, Novartis and Nespresso and many more university spin-offs and new start-up enterprises.

This book includes over 30 real-life, up-to-date, award-winning case studies in scientific fields such as biotechnology, biomedicine, high-tech engineering and information technology. The case studies are arranged in modules that track the typical life cycle of creating and growing a new venture, which presents a comprehensive picture of entrepreneurial activities. The text is written in a language and style that managers will appreciate.

Examples of the value that can be created and captured through crowdsourcing go back to at least 1714 when the UK used crowdsourcing to solve the Longitude Problem, obtaining a solution that would enable the UK to become the dominant maritime force of its time. Today, Wikipedia uses crowds to provide entries for the world's largest and free encyclopedia. Partly fueled by the value that can be created and captured through crowdsourcing, interest in researching the phenomenon has been remarkable. Despite this - or perhaps because of it - research into crowdsourcing has been conducted in different research silos, within the fields of management (from strategy to finance to operations to information systems), biology, communications, computer science, economics, political science, among others. In these silos, crowdsourcing takes names such as broadcast search, innovation tournaments, crowdfunding, community innovation, distributed innovation, collective intelligence, open source, crowdpower, and even open innovation. This book aims to assemble chapters from many of these silos, since the ultimate potential of crowdsourcing research is likely to be attained only by bridging them. Chapters provide a systematic overview of the research on crowdsourcing from different fields based on a more encompassing definition of the concept, its difference for innovation, and its value for both private and public sector.