The entrepreneurial university, academic activities and technology and knowledge transfer in four European countries

Abstract

This paper aims to provide an insight into academics’ perceptions of an entrepreneurial university. In spite of all the initiatives, environmental changes and desire to create entrepreneurial universities, there is limited research on how the entrepreneurial orientation within a university may influence academics’ engagement in different activities. Based on analyzing academics’ survey responses at four European universities (University of Amsterdam, University of Antwerp, University of Ljubljana and the University of Oxford), our findings indicate that more academics in the natural sciences perceive their university department as being highly entrepreneurially oriented than their counterparts in the social sciences. The results also reveal that perceiving a university department as having a high or low entrepreneurial orientation may have a significant effect on whether an academic would engage in some activities that are more entrepreneurial in nature, but a negligible effect on whether an academic would engage in more traditional activities. Further, academics perceiving their university department as being highly entrepreneurially oriented are less likely to believe that engagement in technology and knowledge transfer can be harmful to academic science. At the end, the implications, limitations and future research areas are discussed.