Classical and emergent paradigms of academic entrepreneurship

The academic entrepreneur’s choices and behaviours have been identified by Brennan et al. (2005) as the core field of interest of the research stream on academic entrepreneurship. The present work focuses on this core. The main goal of the paper is to present some classical and emergent models of academic entrepreneurship through exploring and focusing on the motivations of the entrepreneurial decision. Risk aversion, desire of independence, economic and financial reward and “academic return” are the key drivers of the critical decision to start-up a new venture within an academic context. This explorative study is based on two polar case studies, which analyze two different models of hybrid entrepreneurship.