Abstract
This paper aims at empirically measuring the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) of university departments and the impact it has on their ability to generate patents and spin-offs from research. Moving from a recent operazionalization of universities’ EO developed by a group of scholars in Canada, we used a web-based questionnaire to collect information from 206 heads of department of Italian and Spanish universities. Through a multiple regression analysis we assessed the relationship between departments’ EO and performance, expressed in terms of patents and spin-offs. Our findings show that the EO significantly affects the ability of university departments to generate patents and spin-offs. However, not all the dimensions we used to operationalize the EO play the same role. In this sense, our study shows that much more attention should be paid to the context-specific conditions, that can definitively affect the results and the relationships between the investigated variables. Implications, limitations and future improvements of the research are discussed.
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Riviezzo, A., Liñán, F., Napolitano, M.R. (2017). Assessing the Entrepreneurial Orientation of University Departments. A Comparative Study Between Italy and Spain. In: Peris-Ortiz, M., Gómez, J., Merigó-Lindahl, J., Rueda-Armengot, C. (eds) Entrepreneurial Universities. Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47949-1_3
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