Determinants of academic entrepreneurial intentions in technology transfer process: an empirical test

Focusing on the process of creating, discovering, and exploiting technological opportunities created by university research has been a remarkable increasing interest in Academic entrepreneurship as a field of research. The commercialization of university research is today also at the core of many national and local economic policies, including Europe, North America and increasingly Asia (Kroll and Liefner, 2008; Rasmussen, 2008; Shane, 2004). The technology transfer process is an extended course of actions that start with opportunity identification that is clearly an intentional process (Krueger et al., 2000). Moreover technology transfer process involves different groups of interest. According to the Association of University Technology Managers (2004), federal government in the US now provides more than 27.7 dollars billion annually to university researchers to conduct scientific research. This continuing investment expands human knowledge supporting the building of relationships between the different actors involved in the creation of a new business and helps to educate the next generation of science and technology leaders. There is large literature about entrepreneurship in University and technology transfer and the numerous theoretical works investigate the determinants and consequences of university spinoff activity but even though, the most important gap might concern robust empirical studies that investigate this important phenomenon at the individual level (Prodan, I., Drnovsek, M. 2010). We investigate the specific determinants that characterize of academics’ entrepreneurial intention within University context analysing this emergence at individual level. We use empirical data from PhD students employed in the sciences departments of the faculties of one of the most important University in Italy. The paper is structured as follows. We first review prior literature on academic entrepreneurial intention (AEI) and their determinants which are key to the creation of spin-off companies and then present the model grounded in social cognitive theory and hypotheses.