Academic Entrepreneurship in Portugal

Abstract

It is important to understand the role of higher education institutions in promoting entrepreneurship and supporting the creation of new companies to commercialize the knowledge generated in the academic field. The objective of this chapter is to analyze the creation and survival of academic spin-off companies in Portugal from 2005 to 2015. The results show that financial crisis did not change the academic spin-offs dynamics patterns, which shows that, even in crisis period, academic spin-offs maintain creation high levels (perhaps due to necessity-driven) and reveal survival high rates. In addition, a questionnaire was carried out to obtaining the academic entrepreneur's perception about the entrepreneurial process (individual characteristics; organizational resources/capabilities and entrepreneurial orientation). In fact, these results can help policy makers to reflect on the motivations and difficulties of the entrepreneurial process of this type of companies, and thus, develop an effective regional policy agenda in supporting the academic spin-offs development.