Determinants of Academic Entrepreneurial Intentions in Technology Transfer Process: An Empirical Test

Abstract

Policy makers are increasingly recognizing the central role of technology transfer from Universities into academic spinoffs that commercially exploit the research results and new technologies developed within academic scientists. The ability of universities to stimulate entrepreneurial activity and creation of new ventures would influence the economic growth through knowledge regeneration and exploiting academic inventions.Due to the early stage and embryonic nature of university technologies (Agrawal, 2006; Jensen and Thursby, 2001), is important to understand the predictors inside University context that influence the creation of academic spin offs. The technology transfer process is an extended course of actions that start with opportunity identification that is clearly an intentional process (Krueger et al., 2000).The aim of the paper is to focus on the determinants of academic entrepreneurial intentions of a sample of PhD students employed on the science faculty and department of University G.d’Annunzio. This research purpose is to test the validity of a theoretical model of academic-entrepreneurial intentions (Prodan - Drnovsek, 2010) to add an empirical contribute in this field.In Academic Entrepreneurship studies, some scholars have pointed out that additional research is required at individual level (Lockett & Wright, 2005) in order to investigate the relevance of academic founders’ incentives, motivations and capabilities in developing successful academic ventures (Shane, 2004). Academic scientists and in particular PhD students play an important role in determining whether spinoffs will be founded to exploit an invention.Prior studies on opportunity recognition process, when opportunity to create future goods and services are discovered, evaluated and exploited (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000), focused on the necessity to analyze entrepreneurial intentions as a predictor of planned behaviour to create new venture (Ajzen, 1975). The academic entrepreneurial intentions, based on entrepreneurial intentions model (Bird, 1998; Kruegel, 1993),would depend from the ability to execute an intended behaviour and from other variables that are a direct consequence of different environmental characteristics (Prodan & Drnovsek, 2010). In order to highlight the orientation of the academic entrepreneurial intentions of sciences research area in University G.d’Annunzio, was sent a questionnaire to PhD students s to test the robustness of the model. We empirically test the model using structural equation modeling and a robust dataset collected in academic settings.Furthermore the finding of the paper tested in the technical faculties can adds new insights where there was a lack of empirical study to confirm and improve the theoretical model.