How entrepreneurial are students who intend to become academics? – A study of career motives

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to ascertain how students who intend to work as academics differ in their entrepreneurial attitudes and career motives from students who intend to become entrepreneurs. The study is based on quantitative data from two German universities. Our multinomial logistic regression analyses show that some career motives that can be associated with the intention of starting a business can also be associated with the intention of starting an academic career. However, students with academic career intentions are by and large not more likely to develop entrepreneurial intentions than students who intend to become employees outside the academic world. Particularly, compared to students with entrepreneurial career intentions, academic-bound students tend to lack entrepreneurial attitudes, and have a lower desire to achieve financial success and a stronger desire to receive recognition in their future career. These differences should be considered when designing policies that aim at fostering the creation of university spin-offs.