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The aim of this study is to systematise the entrepreneurial coaching (EC) literature by understanding how the phenomenon has been investigated along four dimensions inspired by Gartner’s (1985) conceptualisation of entrepreneurship: entrepreneurial process, context, target and outcomes. In so doing, this study will provide a frame of its multifunctional role and identify relevant gaps and suggestions for future research.

We conducted a systematic literature review to collect existing works on EC. We analysed 85 selected papers with a qualitative content analysis that allowed us to highlight relevant research themes for the entrepreneurial process, context, outcomes and target.

Our results demonstrate that EC has a multifunctional role in entrepreneurship that can be summarised in five different typologies, depending on the stage of the entrepreneurial process in which it is applied, the context, the target and the outcomes.

As one of the first attempts to systematise studies on EC, this work extends previous conceptualisation of EC by detailing different typologies of this intervention, thereby contributing to reduced fragmentation and conceptual ambiguity.

Doctoral students are promising entrepreneurial actors in university-based ventures, which positively impact the external environment and create value for their universities. In this article, the authors extend current research on academic entrepreneurship by shedding light on the role of university support in the early stage of Ph.D. entrepreneurship. Based on social information processing theory, the authors posit that academic entrepreneurship results from the interplay between doctoral students' human capital and university-level support. A multilevel model is proposed and empirically tested to shed light on the cradle of doctoral students' entrepreneurship by explaining the variance of their entrepreneurial alertness and intentions.

A model is proposed that explains the combined effect of specific human capital and different forms of university support on doctoral students' cognitive transition from entrepreneurial alertness to intentions. The model was then tested through structural equation modeling (SEM) and multigroup analysis (MGA) on a sample of 187 doctoral students enrolled in Italian universities.

The SEM results reveal that doctoral students' entrepreneurial alertness is influenced by perceived educational support and human capital. The MGA demonstrates that those who perceive a higher level of support for concept and business development from universities are more likely to convert their alertness into intentions than those who perceive lower support.

The present paper brings to the stage doctoral students as an extremely promising entrepreneurial target. In doing so, it extends academic entrepreneurship studies by detailing how and when the different forms of university support influence their entrepreneurial decisions, along with individual dimensions.