Davide Hahn

Academic spin‐offs (ASOs), a distinct form of hybrid venture, operate at the intersection of economic (business) and non‐economic (academic) logics. Although traditional literature often portrays these logics as inherently conflicting, emphasizing the trade‐offs ASOs must manage, recent empirical findings challenge this view, suggesting that integrating academic and business logics can be beneficial. This paper presents a systematic review of the ASO literature, leveraging the concept of duality to explore the dynamic interplay between academic and business logics. The duality perspective underscores the importance of considering both complementarities and oppositions between seemingly incompatible logics. By synthesizing existing empirical findings, we propose a framework that clarifies how the oppositions and complementarities between academic and business logics influence ASOs’ academic and business outcomes. Our framework highlights the need for more nuanced, dynamic and multilevel approaches in studying ASOs, offering future research directions that embrace the duality perspective. This integrative view aims to inspire further investigation into hybrid ventures, illustrating how economic and non‐economic logics can jointly foster both non‐economic and economic outcomes.

Employees’ entrepreneurial orientation represents a powerful bottom–up force for building organizations that are more resilient to exogenous crises. However, limited empirical knowledge exists regarding how exogenous crises may affect employees’ entrepreneurial orientation in the first place. To address this gap, we draw on threat-rigidity theory and exploit the COVID-19 pandemic as a valuable test bed. Using a survey administered to employees of a system integrator firm pre- and post-COVID-19, we find that the crisis negatively impacted employees’ entrepreneurial orientation. However, entrepreneurial exposure mitigates this effect, ultimately enhancing employees’ entrepreneurial orientation in response to exogenous crises. Our findings deepen the understanding of employees’ entrepreneurial orientation dynamics and the role of entrepreneurial exposure in established firms.

This article presents a case study of the Cooperative University of Mondragon to explore the intricate processes through which higher education institutions (HEIs) adopt an entrepreneurial university (EU) framework across their three core missions: teaching, research, and community outreach. Using a qualitative research design, this study examines the organizational strategies that Mondragon University’s engineering faculty (MGEP) employs to embrace entrepreneurial behaviors (EBs), specifically by building on its peculiar cooperative governance model. The findings shed light on how MGEP, as a prominent example, leverages a long-term vision that centers its decision-making processes on entrepreneurship and the management tools and governance elements that favor collective participation and intrinsic motivation. This research advances our understanding of the evolving landscape of higher education and its entrepreneurial drift in the following ways: (1) by addressing the need for further exploration of governance in EUs; (2) by complementing existing studies on the role of university leadership in the adoption of EBs; and (3) by identifying strategies to overcome inherent barriers within large organizations that impede universities from being entrepreneurial. Overall, this study offers practical implications for the adoption of EBs in HEIs.

An emerging theme in the entrepreneurial university (EU) literature is how universities should evolve to best reconcile their different missions, particularly research and commercialization, which often require different sets of resources. This tension is evident in the development of university spin-offs (USOs). In particular, the EU literature has generally overlooked how characteristics of university research affect USO’s early-stage access to external equity. In this study, we embrace the characterization of university research offered by literature in terms of patterns, specifically, exploration and exploitation. Through the lens of the imprinting perspective, we study the effect of exploration and exploitation in university research on the early-stage equity financing of USOs on a unique dataset that covers a sample of 739 USOs from 39 Italian public universities founded from 2011 to 2019. Our results indicate that exploration (exploitation) in research has an overall positive (negative) impact on the likelihood of USOs obtaining early-stage external equity financing. Additionally, this exploratory study offers several conceptual and practical contributions to the EU literature.

While research on Entrepreneurial University has largely focused on the support to venture creation, its contribution to youth employment and society might be much broader. Entrepreneurial capabilities and attitudes students acquire at universities are crucial also in wageed jobs, and firms need employees predisposed to act entrepreneurially to stay competitive. However, we do not know much about the role of universities in preparing the next generation of graduates for such challenges. To address this gap, in this paper we investigate the extent to which entrepreneurial learning at university contributes to students’ career intentions to work for small rather than larger firms. Additionally, we consider the role of the family context and investigate how the university's influence on students’ career intentions is moderated by students’ exposure to entrepreneurship in their family. Using data from 155,358 students, we find that entrepreneurial learning at university is negatively associated with the preference to work for small firms compared to larger firms and that this effect is even more pronounced for students with enterprising family background, particularly those who have shares in their parents’ company. Besides contributing to research on Entrepreneurial University and career intentions, our findings offer practical implications for universities and employers.

Although entrepreneurship can be taught in different ways, entrepreneurship education impact studies generally fall short with regard to acknowledging the teaching models of the programs they assess. This severely limits our understanding of how entrepreneurship education actually works. To address this gap, this study describes and implements a procedure to identify the teaching models of entrepreneurship education courses and shows how different teaching models are associated with entrepreneurial learning outcomes. Our analysis is based on a sample of 376 Italian university students who responded to the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey (GUESSS) and attended entrepreneurship education courses. We describe and implement a coding procedure that allows us to classify the entrepreneurship courses attended by the respondents into five different teaching models (Supply, Supply–Demand, Demand, Demand–Competence and Competence). We find that courses based on the Supply–Demand, Demand and Demand–Competence Models are associated with better entrepreneurial learning outcomes than those based on the Supply Model. Our findings contribute to the theory and practice of entrepreneurship education program evaluation and design.

The aim of this section is to offer a comprehensive review of research on the financing of innovation. After presenting the challenges associated with financing innovation from a theoretical point of view, the section synthetizes extant literature to show how these challenges constrain the process of raising funds and investing in innovation. The section then describes the role of business angels and venture capital funds, as well as public policy initiatives in support of these investors. Albeit these instruments have been traditionally conceptualized as remedies to these problems, the section also stresses their limitations and critical aspects. Finally, the section provides an overview of the most recent and emerging tools of financing innovation, such as crowd-funding. In particular, we adopt a business-law perspective to describe these instruments and illustrate the trade-off between the protection of investors and the facilitation of innovation, which challenges both scholars and policymakers. The section concludes with a synthetic research agenda with the aim to encourage future research on the functioning of these financial innovations.

Our study illustrates how scientists contribute to the performance of innovative start‐ups through an analysis of 211 Italian start‐ups with and without scientist founders. Building upon imprinting theory, we hypothesize and find that scientists provide an advantage to innovative start‐ups to the extent that they stimulate open innovation (i.e., search breadth and depth). However, for this to effectively occur, the involvement of multiple scientist founders is needed, so that their career imprints internalized in the lab are successfully transferred to the start‐up. Moreover, if the start‐up embraces business practices (i.e., strategic planning) or departs from scientific logics (i.e., pursuing non‐commercial goals), scientists’ contribution is further increased. Therefore, our study illustrates how the scientist career imprint can provide an advantage to innovative start‐ups with multiple scientists, but also how it can act as a rigidity if the start‐up does not pursue strategic planning or emphasizes non‐commercial goals.