Conceptual Development of Academic Entrepreneurial Intentions Scale

Abstract

Academic entrepreneurship is recognized as one of the values created by universities with their mission of being an entrepreneurial university in addition to teaching and research. The “entrepreneurial university” concept carries out this mission with technology transfer and firm formation activities. “Academic entrepreneur” can be narrowly defined as a faculty or advanced level research student at a university who creates a new organization and bring his or her innovation/invention/solution to market as a commercial opportunity. Based on the Theory of Planned Behavior by Ajzen (1991) and Armitage& Conner (2001), the best predictor of this behavioral outcome of being involved in setting up an academic spin-off can be referred to as “academic entrepreneurial intentions”. There are various scales in place attempting to measure entrepreneurial intentions of adults and students such as Chen et al.’ s Entrepreneurial Decision Scale (1998), Krueger et al.’ s Entrepreneurial Intentions Scale (2000), Thompson’ s Individual Entrepreneurial Intent Scale (2009), and Liñán & Chen” s Entrepreneurship Intentions Questionnaire (2009). However a more comprehensive scale needs to be developed to measure the target construct of entrepreneurial intentions of academics concerning the individual and contextual circumstances specific to the university settings and the nature of business. In this regard, similar attempts have taken place to develop a scale for measuring academics’ entrepreneurial intentions such as the study of Prodan and Drnovsek (2010) however the scale did not provide the specific dimensions to target academics. The most promising scale is of a recent study by Huyghe & Knockaert (2014). This research aims to offer a conceptual discussion of measuring academic entrepreneurial intentions promising a novel contribution to construct reliability and validity measures in the future as addressed by Clark& Watson (1995).