Digital Academic Entrepreneurship: A structured literature review and avenue for a research agenda

Abstract

This paper reviews the Academic Entrepreneurship literature according to the emergence of powerful Digital technologies, providing an overview of the state of research and outlining a future research agenda about Digital Academic Entrepreneurship. One hundred and sixty-five journal papers were initially extracted from Scopus and their content was analysed for the paper selection process by two researchers in parallel, plus a third one in case of uncertainty. Finally, fifty-nine papers dealing with digital academic entrepreneurship and published in a variety of academic journals have been analyzed through a content and a bibliometric analysis. Findings show that literature on Digital Academic Entrepreneurship is really scant and dominated by unrelated research. Content analysis provides the emergence of four major research streams: 1) Digital Technologies for Entrepreneurship Education; 2) The “maker space movement” for Academic Entrepreneurship; 3) Digital technologies for discovering entrepreneurial opportunities; 4) Creating entrepreneurial competences in the Digital “University-based” Entrepreneurial ecosystems. The paper presents the first attempt to provide a comprehensive structured literature review of the disruptive role of digital transformation for the Academic Entrepreneurship. Despite the growing literature on Digital Entrepreneurship, this research area is still fragmented and undertheorized. More systematic and holistic studies, considering both the technological, economic and the social aspects of Academic Entrepreneurship are required.