Opening the black box of academic entrepreneurship: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

The increasing importance of academic entrepreneurship as a key mechanism for new innovative advancements and regional economic developments fostered a development of this research domain. The burgeoning literature examining key antecedents and consequences of academic entrepreneurship resulted in complex, multifaceted concept development, which hinder both the possibilities to grasp the crucial interlinkages and a comprehensive assessment of the latest theoretical contributions. Thus, to decrease the current risk of the field’s further fragmentation and to support the comparison with the new emerging patterns, this paper seeks to develop new bibliometric insights and outline a nuanced research agenda for further advancements. To conduct a quantitative literature review, this paper employs bibliographic coupling on a sample of 615 Web of Science peer-reviewed articles on academic entrepreneurship. To conduct a comprehensive interpretation of the bibliometric findings, I perform additional hierarchical clustering of the frequent terms and content analysis of the publications. The results indicate that the academic entrepreneurship research field is based on four interconnected clusters: (1) the anatomy of an entrepreneurial university and its main components, (2) university spinoffs and technology commercialization, (3) the identities of academic entrepreneurs and their motivations and barriers in entrepreneurial activities, and (4) knowledge transfer and regional economic impacts. These findings are of high importance to academics who seek to enhance entrepreneurial processes and to policymakers interested in stimulating academic entrepreneurship.

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