Experiencing the Commercialisation Journey: Female Researcher-Founders and University Support Structures in German Deep Tech
(2026) ENTN19 20261Department of Business Administration
- Abstract
- Female researchers remain visibly under-represented among deep-tech founders in Germany. Although women are present in Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and early academic research, the founder gap is larger than the pipeline alone would predict, signalling leakage at later, commercialisation-oriented stages of the academic career. This study examines how female researcher-founders in German deep tech experience the support structures of university entrepreneurial ecosystems (UEEs) during their transition from academic research to founding. The study adopts an interpretivist design and applies Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to interviews with seven female researcher-founders in German deep... (More)
- Female researchers remain visibly under-represented among deep-tech founders in Germany. Although women are present in Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and early academic research, the founder gap is larger than the pipeline alone would predict, signalling leakage at later, commercialisation-oriented stages of the academic career. This study examines how female researcher-founders in German deep tech experience the support structures of university entrepreneurial ecosystems (UEEs) during their transition from academic research to founding. The study adopts an interpretivist design and applies Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to interviews with seven female researcher-founders in German deep tech, concentrated in southern Germany, in dialogue with two institutional representative interviews, read thematically, and external interviews with experts in the space, used as a triangulation horizon. Analysis is guided by North's institutional theory and feminist institutionalism (FI). Two findings carry the analytic weight of the study. First, the UEE is best understood as a stage-dependent resource: enabling at the early legitimation stages of the transition through programme access, legitimacy signals and funding scaffolding, and progressively frictionful as the venture matures toward investor engagement, where Intellectual Property (IP) architecture, “Existenzgrüdungen aus der Wissenschaft” (EXIST; the German federal startup funding programme for academic spin-offs) eligibility rules and the absence of post-founding bridge capital actively work against deep-tech ventures. Second, the founders describe the formal apparatus as gender-neutral while experiencing the lived texture of founding as gendered throughout, a formal/lived gap that the analysis reads as the operation of an implicit institutional ideal founder against whom the system is silently calibrated. Three gatekeeping points carry these dynamics: intransparent IP negotiation, the EXIST-to-investor transition, and the informal identity shift from researcher to founder. The study contributes a stage-sensitive vocabulary for UEE evaluation, empirical support for the feminist-institutionalist claim, and a meso-level extension of North's institutional theory to UEE contexts. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9240403
- author
- Schleinkofer, Anna LU and Petersen, Tim LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- ENTN19 20261
- year
- 2026
- type
- H1 - Master's Degree (One Year)
- subject
- keywords
- Female Entrepreneurship, University Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, Deep Tech, Institutional Theory, Feminist Institutionalism, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis
- language
- English
- id
- 9240403
- date added to LUP
- 2026-06-23 16:15:16
- date last changed
- 2026-06-23 16:15:16
@misc{9240403,
abstract = {{Female researchers remain visibly under-represented among deep-tech founders in Germany. Although women are present in Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and early academic research, the founder gap is larger than the pipeline alone would predict, signalling leakage at later, commercialisation-oriented stages of the academic career. This study examines how female researcher-founders in German deep tech experience the support structures of university entrepreneurial ecosystems (UEEs) during their transition from academic research to founding. The study adopts an interpretivist design and applies Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to interviews with seven female researcher-founders in German deep tech, concentrated in southern Germany, in dialogue with two institutional representative interviews, read thematically, and external interviews with experts in the space, used as a triangulation horizon. Analysis is guided by North's institutional theory and feminist institutionalism (FI). Two findings carry the analytic weight of the study. First, the UEE is best understood as a stage-dependent resource: enabling at the early legitimation stages of the transition through programme access, legitimacy signals and funding scaffolding, and progressively frictionful as the venture matures toward investor engagement, where Intellectual Property (IP) architecture, “Existenzgrüdungen aus der Wissenschaft” (EXIST; the German federal startup funding programme for academic spin-offs) eligibility rules and the absence of post-founding bridge capital actively work against deep-tech ventures. Second, the founders describe the formal apparatus as gender-neutral while experiencing the lived texture of founding as gendered throughout, a formal/lived gap that the analysis reads as the operation of an implicit institutional ideal founder against whom the system is silently calibrated. Three gatekeeping points carry these dynamics: intransparent IP negotiation, the EXIST-to-investor transition, and the informal identity shift from researcher to founder. The study contributes a stage-sensitive vocabulary for UEE evaluation, empirical support for the feminist-institutionalist claim, and a meso-level extension of North's institutional theory to UEE contexts.}},
author = {{Schleinkofer, Anna and Petersen, Tim}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Experiencing the Commercialisation Journey: Female Researcher-Founders and University Support Structures in German Deep Tech}},
year = {{2026}},
}