Academic Entrepreneurship in Higher Educational Institutions: Review of Recent Literature

Abstract

In recent decades, academic entrepreneurship has become a global phenomenon and gained attention to promote innovative entrepreneurs from academics (Shane, 2004; Soares, 2017). Universities and higher education institutions continuously generate and accumulate knowledge, and there is a strong positive relationship between knowledge spill overs and entrepreneurship (Acs et al., 2009). The knowledge spill over is the key in generation of new technologies and innovations which produce potential entrepreneurs through the creation of adequate support services and structures such as pre-incubators and incubators (European Commission, 2000; Smith et al., 2014). In the academic entrepreneurship literature, various structured entrepreneurial efforts have been observed such as the proliferation of preincubation, incubation facilities in academic institutions, and acceleration programs with a component of mentorship as an integral feature (Bruneel et al., 2012; Ergun & Teraman, 2016) in fostering academic entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial mentoring is a new edition to the literature (Ergun & Teraman, 2016) which is generally seen as a tool to match novice entrepreneurs with an experienced individual to make informed choice to avoid any fatal mistake in the entrepreneurial venture (E. St-Jean & Audet, 2012; É. St-Jean & Mathieu, 2015; Ergun & Teraman, 2016;) Collectively, above structures and functions are part of academic entrepreneurship ultimately helps in generating innovations and start-ups founded by faculties and (or) students either while studying or after completing academic based on the technology (or) business solution developed within the university context (Smilor, 1987). Academic entrepreneurship literature also informs that there are multiple factors influences for the existence of cross-variance between academics in successful generating innovations and start-ups (Gregorio and Shane, 2003). The proposed empirical research is to study the various structures and functions in building academic entrepreneurship in the context of Indian higher educational institutions to generate innovations and start-ups from academics.