Opening the black box of academic entrepreneurship: a bibliometric analysis

Igors Skute

doi:10.1007/s11192-019-03116-w

Abstract

The increasing importance of academic entrepreneurship as a key mechanism for new innovative advancements and regional economic developments fostered a development of this research domain. The burgeoning literature examining key antecedents and consequences of academic entrepreneurship resulted in complex, multifaceted concept development, which hinder both the possibilities to grasp the crucial interlinkages and a comprehensive assessment of the latest theoretical contributions. Thus, to decrease the current risk of the field’s further fragmentation and to support the comparison with the new emerging patterns, this paper seeks to develop new bibliometric insights and outline a nuanced research agenda for further advancements. To conduct a quantitative literature review, this paper employs bibliographic coupling on a sample of 615 Web of Science peer-reviewed articles on academic entrepreneurship. To conduct a comprehensive interpretation of the bibliometric findings, I perform additional hierarchical clustering of the frequent terms and content analysis of the publications. The results indicate that the academic entrepreneurship research field is based on four interconnected clusters: (1) the anatomy of an entrepreneurial university and its main components, (2) university spinoffs and technology commercialization, (3) the identities of academic entrepreneurs and their motivations and barriers in entrepreneurial activities, and (4) knowledge transfer and regional economic impacts. These findings are of high importance to academics who seek to enhance entrepreneurial processes and to policymakers interested in stimulating academic entrepreneurship.

Highlights

Acknowledging the strong interest in academic entrepreneurship in the past years, university spinoffs (USOs) and entrepreneurial academics are increasingly considered as great potential sources of new and often disruptive innovations
Based on the recent developments and governmental initiatives, academic institutions are challenged to balance more traditional activities of education and research with increasing commercialization efforts (Galan-Muros et al 2017; Grimaldi et al 2011). This has facilitated the development of various research threads in the academic entrepreneurship literature, which has focused on antecedents and consequences of entrepreneurial universities, the process and key determinants of USO development, and the entrepreneurial competencies of researchers engaging in research commercialization activities (Hayter et al 2018; Mathisen and Rasmussen 2019; Perkmann et al 2013; Rasmussen and Wright 2015; Vohora et al 2004)
A publication can be assigned to more than one category. These three most common categories are associated with 56.9% of publications in the dataset, suggesting that academic entrepreneurship is a specific niche topic in management and entrepreneurship literature; the results signal that academic entrepreneurship is a multidisciplinary phenomenon that is receiving attention from diverse research fields, such as biomedical technologies, health policy services, women’s studies and other research fields in which the entrepreneurial academic organizations and their actors are key subjects of studies

Summary

Introduction

Acknowledging the strong interest in academic entrepreneurship in the past years, university spinoffs (USOs) and entrepreneurial academics are increasingly considered as great potential sources of new and often disruptive innovations. Based on the recent developments and governmental initiatives, academic institutions are challenged to balance more traditional activities of education and research with increasing commercialization efforts (Galan-Muros et al 2017; Grimaldi et al 2011) This has facilitated the development of various research threads in the academic entrepreneurship literature, which has focused on antecedents and consequences of entrepreneurial universities, the process and key determinants of USO development, and the entrepreneurial competencies of researchers engaging in research commercialization activities (Hayter et al 2018; Mathisen and Rasmussen 2019; Perkmann et al 2013; Rasmussen and Wright 2015; Vohora et al 2004)

Results

Discussion

Conclusion