You cannot teach the crossing from science to market abstractly; it has to be taught from cases someone actually lived.
Entrepreneurship education often runs on stylised case studies and frameworks abstracted to the point of harmlessness. But the knowledge that matters in deep-tech commercialization — how a certification negotiation actually goes, why a feedstock contract fell through, what an investor’s technical due-diligence really probes — is tacit, contingent, and learned by doing. It resists the textbook.
My teaching argument is that this knowledge is best transmitted by bringing real, unresolved venture cases into the classroom: the messy specifics of a genuine funding stack, a genuine consortium negotiation, a genuine first-of-a-kind trial. My involvement in DTU’s hard-tech entrepreneurship incubator, the MSc in Technology Entrepreneurship, X-Tech, and executive education is built on the premise that students learn commercialization from someone who has scars from it.
This is also a claim about who should teach it. The practitioner-scholar — someone who has both built a venture and can reflect on it rigorously — occupies a distinctive and under-supplied position in entrepreneurship education. The lived case is the curriculum.
The open question
How can tacit commercialization knowledge be made teachable without flattening the contingency that gives it value?