Knowledge capitalization for development: Prioritizing the relative dominance of drivers for intellectual entrepreneuring in the tertiary knowledge industry

Economic trends now show that the knowledge industry is becoming the dominant contributor to sustainable economic growth. Developed and emerging economies are skewing more and more towards knowledge capitalization for continuous improvement of productivitydriven competition in order to attain better (i) economic performance; (ii) wealth generation; and (iii) development and growth. On the other hand, their developing counterparts who as contemporary economic operators are compelled by unavoidable circumstances to compete in the global market are lagging behind.; This dissertation explores intellectual entrepreneurial capacity gap as fuelling the growing technology gap---one of the multiple limiting factors constraining the attainment of equity between developed and developing economies. As a contribution to solving the gap, this dissertation develops an integrative conceptual framework of drivers for intellectual entrepreneurial capacity in knowledge capitalization for technological and economic leapfrogging in development. The framework is conceived in the context of the tertiary knowledge industry as the industry undergoes reforms into centers of society-entrepreneurs to build and train citizen scholars skilled to manage the gap.; The framework has been refined, validated and revalidated through several processes: (i) presentation to and feedback from dissertation supervisory committee and other relevant faculty; (ii) presentation to and feedback from participants in a conference of academicians; (iii) four case interviews with practitioner/professional experts endowed with privileged work-cum-academic experience in the community of practice for prioritization of relative dominance of the elements, as well as for validating the Delphi Method and Analytic Hierarchy Process used for data collection and treatment; and (iv) field-testing the framework with its prioritized elements for its applicability, as well as revalidating the framework and the various tools used in data collection and analysis.; Key findings show that: (i) the perception of relative dominance of drivers for intellectual entrepreneurial capacity for knowledge capitalization in a development context vary among the practitioner/professional experts; (ii) integrating expert scoring and then rank-ordering the results reveals that the most relatively dominant of the 34 framework elements is the 'enabling environment'; and (iii) knowledge business operators find the framework useful but caution that it has to be adjusted for differences in culture.; Keywords. intellectual, entrepreneuring, knowledge, capitalization, leapfrogging, development.