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According to the paradigm of the Triple Helix, universities are moving from their traditional roles of research, teaching and knowledge dissemination to an entrepreneurial role. Specifically, they contribute to innovation and competitiveness by creating academic spin-offs (ASOs). In such a context, the diffusion of digital technologies is impacting both on the development of new forms of academic entrepreneurship and on the motivations of academics in launching ASOs. Grounded on a recent reconceptualization developed on identity theory, this study investigates the motivations that lead an academic to establish a spin-off and if, how and why these motivations vary over time.

An extensive online survey was performed in order to obtain a final database of 151 Italian ASOs. Different statistical techniques were used, such as Cluster analysis and ANOVA, to identify different ASO profiles and to understand how and why these profiles change over time.

The results suggest that motivations change over time: while financial aspects become less important, academics give more importance to other issues. Time, experience and financial gain influence the evolution of academic entrepreneurs' motivations over time.

Insights derived from the study could help policy-makers and administrators in better understanding this phenomenon and the possible evolution of such academic motivations in the context of digitalization, and enable them to act accordingly to foster academic entrepreneurship.

The main contributions of the present study are the addition of empirical knowledge to the scant and anecdotal literature existing to date and the inclusion of cognitive and psychological theoretical perspectives in the academic entrepreneurship debate. Moreover, it is believed that no other study has investigated the above topics in the Italian context.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to shed light on the increasing start-up competitions (SUCs) phenomenon; second, to provide an interpretive framework to understand whether the SUCs have the potential to be effective entrepreneurial learning environment; third, to analyse the different roles of public and private actors in organizing SUCs.

The paper presents a cross-section analysis of the Italian SUCs population. In total, 77 competitions are analysed on the basis of different criteria which should properly mirror their distinguishing structural features, helping understand the potential of SUCs as learning environments.

The recent increase in the number of SUCs has been mainly fuelled by private actors. Moreover, Italian SUCs show some features that make them rich learning environments. Private and public actors play different roles, as confirmed by statistical tests performed. Privately organized SUCs follow mainly a market-oriented approach, while publicly organized ones are more education oriented.

The findings cannot be easily generalized mainly due to the peculiarities of the Italian context.

Soft forms of regulation should be defined to strengthen those features which could potentially support the entrepreneurial learning processes. In this view, SUCs should be part of a start-up friendly ecosystem where actors (startuppers, incubators, venture capitalists) are effectively coordinated with each other.

Despite the remarkable diffusion of SUCs, there are significant gaps in literature about this phenomenon. Given the lack of a systematic and comprehensive analysis of SUCs as effective entrepreneurial learning environments, the paper represents an important starting point.

This paper aims to conceptualize the digital behavior of startups and investigate the emerging behaviors about digital strategies of the Italian startup firms enrolled in the Startup Act policy initiative. Digital technologies were divided into intra- and inter-organizational digital infrastructures, and this categorization offers startups the opportunity to identify a set of enabling technologies that could be used to improve their digital strategies.

An empirical analysis has been conducted to investigate the degree of adoption of digital intra- and inter-organizational digital infrastructures in the entire population of 6,178 Italian firms listed in the Register of Innovative Startups.

The paper proposes a taxonomy bringing together four startup behaviors for adopting digital technologies: digital follower, technical influencer, social influencer and digital leader. From the perspective of policy makers, considering the financial efforts that public authorities are supporting in the last decade, implications are mainly concerned with policy measures aimed both to reinforce the overall adoption of digital technologies and to develop a balanced adoption of intra- and inter-organizational digital infrastructures.

Measures addressed to support female and foreign entrepreneurship could be useful to support a more dynamic and well-balanced cultural and racial contamination, thus improving the adoption of digital tools.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of higher education on the emergence of entrepreneurial intention (EI) and human capital (HC) as a component of intellectual capital (IC) that strongly influences the entrepreneurial process.

On the basis of a literature review, a theoretical model that is focused on the theory of planned behaviour was defined to verify the impact of higher education on the development of EI and HC. To this end, the structural equation modelling methodology was applied to two samples of students and academics, which differ each other in terms of both education level and specific characteristics of entrepreneurship education activities.

The main results show that there are significant differences between the two considered samples. In particular, the level and specific characteristics of entrepreneurial education are the key factors for the development of EI and HC.

The research may be of relevance for universities and policy makers. Universities must devote more attention to training and practice-oriented entrepreneurial courses and collateral activities (projects, initiatives, actions), both for students (first mission) and academic aspiring entrepreneurs (third mission) to encourage the emergence of EI and HC formation. For policy makers, this study suggests the need to define policy guidelines and frameworks to support universities’ educational programmes and activities to strengthen the entrepreneurial process, so that they can be consistent with the EU and national entrepreneurship policies.

This explorative research intends to contribute to the scientific debate by filling the knowledge gap that is due to the very limited number of studies that analyse whether and how EI can mediate the relationship between higher education and HC as an IC component.

In this paper the aim is to present Debate Dashboard, an online collaborative platform designed to support distributed knowledge management and decision making. The platform integrates an argument mapping tool with visual widgets with the objective of enhancing collective sense‐making and mutual understanding as well as to compensate for the costs of mediated communication in virtual collaborative environments.

The design of Debate Dashboard is based on the theory of common ground according to which participants involved in a conversation build mutual understanding thanks to the exchange of different types of feedback. Using the concept of grounding cost, the authors identified several features of the Dashboard supposed to favour mutual understanding and knowledge sharing. Such features have been implemented through six visual widgets selected through a benchmarking of currently available visualization tools.

The paper discusses the limitations and advantages of online argumentation to support online discussions and presents a review of current visualization tools. The design of a new platform able to integrate online argumentation and visualization technologies is described and it is argued that Debate Dashboard will improve online collaboration in many respects especially in terms of supporting the construction of shared knowledge representations for geographically distributed collaborative teams.

First, the work adds to the debate on the development of online argumentation platforms by offering an alternative theoretical perspective based on language and conversational studies. Second, it proposes for the first time to integrate argumentation and visualization technologies in the same tool to create an augmented collaborative platform able to overcome the limitations of both traditional online collaboration technologies, such as forums and wikis, as well as the criticalities associated with the use of argumentation technologies.

Nowadays organizations have realized that knowledge, its effective use and the fast acquisition and utilization of new knowledge represent the only source of sustainable competitive advantage. In fact, an effective exploitation and management of knowledge resources are the basis of the development of those capabilities that ground the organization's capacity to deliver successfully targeted value propositions. During recent decades, there has been a growing interest in the processes of management of knowledge resources. Currently the debate on knowledge management processes is still lively. The dynamics which link knowledge processes to value creation, the valuation of their impact on organizational performance and the role of some organizational and technological resources as enablers or restraints of successful knowledge management emerge as relevant topics to be investigated. This introduction to the special issue aims to develop some theoretical and managerial reasons explaining the importance of an effective management of knowledge processes to deal with the uncertainty, change, and turbulence of the current socio‐economic scenario.

The approaches, evidences and insights discussed in this introduction are largely based on the discussion of the topics of the conference “International forum on knowledge assets dynamics” organized in June 2010 in Matera, Italy. At this conference, leading experts discussed the challenges and practices of measuring and managing knowledge resources to support value creation and business performance improvement of organisational systems.

The outcomes of this introduction and of all the contributions to the special issue reflect the emerging discussion about the role of knowledge processes and, more generally, of the management of knowledge resources, in value creation. This discussion is largely focused on the dynamics at the base of the translation of knowledge processes and resources into value, highlighting properly approaches and tools or application in different contexts of analysis.

This introduction, as well as all the contributions to the special issue, deal with different aspects which are important in the discussion both of the role played by knowledge processes in achieving outstanding organisational performance and the approaches, tools, methods and techniques to structure, organize knowledge resources and optimize their use in order to support effective organizational processes execution and value creation.