Abstract
A recent call has urged to broaden the conceptualization of university entrepreneurship in order to appreciate the heterogeneity of contexts and actors involved in the process of entrepreneurial creation. A gap still persists in the understanding of the variety of ventures generated by different academic stakeholders, and the relationships between these entrepreneurial developments and university missions, namely, teaching and research. This paper addresses this particular gap by looking at how university teaching and research activities influence universities’ entrepreneurial ventures such as academic spin-offs and graduate start-ups. Empirically, we analyse the English higher education sector, drawing on institutional data at the university level. First, we explore the ways in which teaching and research activities are configured, and secondly, we examine how such configurations relate to academic spin-offs and graduate start-ups across different universities over time. Our findings suggest, first, that the evolution of USOs and graduate start-ups exhibit two different pathways over time; and second, that teaching and research both affect entrepreneurial ventures but their effect is different.
Highlights
The role of the university has evolved over time in response to the forces shaping economic growth (Audretsch 2014)
This paper addresses this particular gap by looking at how the institutional contexts of university activities, those inherently related to teaching and research, influence university entrepreneurial ventures, focusing on university spin-offs and graduate start-ups
The aim of this work is to improve our understanding of how activities related to teaching and research affect the diversity of entrepreneurial ventures generated at the university level, and asking whether or not universities with different organization of research and teaching activities should pursue the same goals in terms of business ventures
Summary
The role of the university has evolved over time in response to the forces shaping economic growth (Audretsch 2014). A number of studies on academic entrepreneurship and ‘‘university entrepreneurship’’ (Rothaermel et al 2007) has acknowledged the high potential of academic entrepreneurial mechanisms as beneficial to the economy and society in general (Feldman and Desrochers 2004; Shane 2004; O’Shea et al 2005; Wright et al 2007). There is an acknowledged need to extend the understanding of the different contexts of entrepreneurship, actors and mechanisms that facilitate a wide range of venture creation (Leitch et al 2012; Siegel and Wright 2015). Whilst studies suggest that more consideration should be given to both the growing scale and economic relevance of students’ start-ups, empirical findings investigating these processes in relation to the organizational contexts of universities remain limited (e.g. Astebro et al 2012; Guerrero et al 2016; Bergmann et al 2016; Beyhan and Findik 2017)
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