ICECH2020 - International Conference on Emerging Challenges: Contemporary Issues in Innovation and Management 721 ESTABLISHING UNIVERSITY VENTURE CAPITAL FUND: THE CASE OF HANOI UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Nguyen Thuc Huong Giang 1* , Nigel Culkin 2 , Tran Van Binh 1 , Le Vu Toan 3 1 School of Economics and Management, Hanoi University of Science and Technology 2 University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom 3 Vietnam Institute of Science, Technology and Innovation, Ministry of Science and Technology * Corresponding author: giang.nguyenthuchuong@hust.edu.vn Abtract For entrepreneurs to be successful in any country, they need a favourable environment in which they can develop their ideas and grow their business. The concept of this environment, an ecosystem, is rooted in earlier developments around science parks and industrial district movements. Within every entrepreneurial ecosystem much attention is focused on the role and health of its start-up component. Vietnam has experienced significant and rapid economic growth in the last twenty years; and, this shift has seen the county acknowledged as a leading nation for start-ups in Southeast Asia. As a result, an increasing number of start-ups are being formed among university students, lecturers, and researchers, especially those in Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths (STEM) disciplines. However, one of the main obstacles most start-up projects is raising capital for deploying and commercializing scientific and technological R&D results. In many Western countries (e.g. USA, UK and the EU), University venture capital funds (UVCs) have been created in an attempt to overcome this barrier. In this paper we discuss how can one university in Vietnam - Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST) - establish an innovative start-up investment fund (the BK Fund). Theoretical and practical studies on setting up University venture capital funds will be necessary for HUST to overcome the legal barriers, financial resources difficulties and other constrains during the fund’s establishment and implementation process. Keywords: University venture capital fund, start-up, spinoff, HUST. 1. INTRODUCTION We know that businesses – at any stage of their life - seldom operate in isolation and gain valuable knowledge from the local and regional economic area. When creativity and innovation have been placed at the center of entrepreneurship activity, the location where creating new technology ideas can be considered as the “nucleus” of the wider entrepreneurial ecosystem (Isenberg, 2010; Tung, 2018). Such an ecosystem can be defined as a community consisting of many self-governing actors (universities, governments, firms, investors, mentors, service providers) that can play a key role in the development of entrepreneurial activities for a given geographical area (Hechavarría & Ingram, 2018). So, if we take the case of the European Union, at the heart of their enterprise policy is a desire to provide an environment that is conducive to business creation and development, acknowledging the role of new firms in terms of job creation. As, van der Zwaan (2017) stated in his EU Report Higher Education in 2040: “tomorrow all universities will derive their right to exist primarily from being active in society and by producing knowledge for society;” in the light of this statement, a university therefore needs not only to manage its internal environment, but also to develop and manage relationships with various stakeholders coming from public and private sector (Etzkowitz, 2017). In 2020, Research England (RE) who are responsible for funding research and knowledge exchange at Higher Education Institutes invested in excess of £2,235M in support of enterprise-related activities to help the sector become a key partner in this process through a variety of initiatives (Culkin and Mallick, 2010). Such policies are underpinned by a (political) belief that increasing entrepreneurial activity is central to the UK’s drive for brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by University of Hertfordshire Research Archive