Supporting Inclusive Recognition of Innovation & Entrepreneurship
An overview of the Promotion & Tenure – Innovation & Entrepreneurship (PTIE) effort
November 2023
Universities today can, and should, enable greater contributions toward solving society’s critical problems while also boosting academic excellence. To do so, universities must ensure that promotion and tenure processes fairly assess and value entrepreneurial, innovative endeavors that can produce the kind of societal impacts that universities are increasingly being called on to provide.
Oregon State University, with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, facilitated a national conversation on how to inclusively recognize innovation & entrepreneurship impact by university faculty in promotion, tenure, and advancement guidelines and practices. This led to the creation of the Promotion & Tenure Innovation & Entrepreneurship (PTIE) effort, which now involves more than 65 U.S. institutions and numerous national stakeholder organizations. This work has resulted in a comprehensive set of recommendations for promotion and tenure reform.
Webinar speakers Rich Carter and Almesha Campbell described the networked-systems approach PTIE has taken to develop a nationwide coalition. They shared how universities can use the resulting framework to better align the intellectual capabilities of their faculty with an innovation economy, and how the strategy can be broadly applicable, beyond innovation and entrepreneurship, to recognize the many and evolving dimensions along which faculty create societal impacts.
Key Takeaway Messages
There is a considerable appetite for broadening incentive systems to support societally-impactful research.
The intent of promotion reform is to remove a disconnect by rewarding faculty for efforts that the university already values.
Read the key takeaway messages from all of our webinars here.
Watch the full webinar recording
Watch key excerpts from the webinar
Webinar Speakers
Dr. Rich Carter
Oregon State University
Rich Carter is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Faculty Lead for Innovation Excellence in the Office of Research at Oregon State University. He is the Principal Investigator of the NSF-funded program that led to the creation of the PTIE effort.
Dr. Almesha Campbell
Jackson State University
Almesha Campbell is the Assistant Vice President for Research and Economic Development at Jackson State University (JSU). For over 10 years, she served as the Director for Technology Transfer and Commercialization at JSU and continues to manage the intellectual property process from triage of invention disclosures to commercialization.
