Academic Entrepreneurship Support in the Hub-University Model

By Mireille Matt, Véronique Schaeffer
English

This paper focuses on the role of universities and their Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) in stimulating academic entrepreneurship. We contend that, in regional systems of innovation that are suffering from a lack of coordination between the various players involved in the process of start-up creation, universities need to evolve towards a role of hub-university (Youtie and Shapira 2008). We show that the university and its TTO develop the functions of network building, orchestrating, and boundary spanning, and we apply this framework to the case of one of the largest French universities to reveal the micro-foundations of these three functions. Through a longitudinal study, we show how this university has evolved from a boundary spanner to a hub organization role, building each function in a sequential way.JEL Codes : R1, O3

Keywords

  • academic entrepreneurship
  • hub-university
  • orchestrator
  • technology transfer
  • regional ecosystem
Go to the article on Cairn-int.info