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Despite the significance, university student start-ups and student entrepreneurship ecosystems (SEEs) have been subject to little research. This study aims to apply a qualitative emergent enquiry approach to explore best practice SEEs in Australia, complimented by narratives from leading scholars in higher education institutions with the aim of delineating the integrative components of SEEs.

Adopting the entrepreneurial ecosystem framework and aligned to the social cognitive theory, this paper explores the components and dynamics of SEEs, contributing to an understanding of how such components can better support the growth, sustainability and success of student start-ups. The authors extend entrepreneurship research on social construction using narrative research.

The findings provide guidelines for researchers, entrepreneurship scholars and educators, entrepreneurship students, policymakers and practitioners to enhance the impact and success of university student start-ups by adopting a student ecosystem approach.

The narratives represent a limited number of universities with an opportunity for further research to empirically measure the impact and outcomes of SEEs. The research is exploratory, inherently conceptual and emergent, providing an opportunity for validation of narrative frameworks in future studies.

The findings may assist university managers to be more aware of their own subconscious preferences to student entrepreneurship and start-up initiatives, which may be useful in refining their impact and offerings regarding a quest toward the entrepreneurial university.

From social perspectives, the alignment of the components of SEE has the ability to enhance and shift the entrepreneurial mindset of entrepreneurship students, notwithstanding enhancement of intentionality and self-efficacy.

This is the first study of SEEs in Australia, highlighting the importance of the integration of entrepreneurship education programs, entrepreneurship education ecosystems, the entrepreneurial university and specific start-up initiatives such as university accelerators. Furthermore, students may enhance their entrepreneurial mindset by actively engaging in such ecosystems.

The purpose of the paper is to provide insight into how students navigate entrepreneurial ecosystems and make use of social networks as they create their own ventures. Such ecosystems for students are an understudied phenomenon and there is a need for more profound insights into the issue in order to build better support systems for student entrepreneurs. The study aims to increase understanding on the elements that are important in students' entrepreneurial ecosystems and how these impact on students' venture creation processes, with emphasize on the role social networks play. Student entrepreneurs account for a substantial number of the startups that come into being at universities. Understanding more about how the surroundings affects this process is important for facilitating student entrepreneurship in higher education.

The study is qualitative and makes use of in-depth interviews with student entrepreneurs, educators and support actors in the ecosystems. Multiple actors were interviewed in order to capture different perspectives on the matter, with a total of 15 interviews conducted.

Two main findings arose from the study. First, it provides insight into elements that are perceived as important for student venture creation by the student entrepreneurs themselves, by educators and by support actors in the ecosystems. Second, it describes how the elements make up the entrepreneurial ecosystems surrounding the students, which serve as platforms from which students can develop their social networks. Therefore, the study highlights how such ecosystems can serve as sources from which students can gain access to ideas, resources and identity processes.

A limitation of the study is that the interviews took place in one country. Consequently, further investigation is necessary to establish whether the findings are valid in other contexts. The research has implications for higher educational institutions, policymakers and researchers concerned with student entrepreneurship and student venture creation.

The study contributes empirical findings on a topic that is currently not well understood and on which there are few empirical studies. While student ventures represent a substantial proportion of university spin-offs, the topic has received little attention compared to research on academic entrepreneurship. The study represents a step towards enhancing understanding of students' entrepreneurial ecosystems and how students gain access to resources through social network ties within these systems.

This study aims to understand the impact of student entrepreneurship and university support on faculty intrapreneurship. The authors also analyze the role of the university’s dynamic and ordinary capabilities and the environmental dynamism in which the university is embedded.

With a large survey data set involving 680 professors and 2,230 students from 70 Brazilian universities, the authors use a multimethod approach with partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

The PLS-SEM results demonstrate that student entrepreneurship indirectly influences faculty intrapreneurship through the interaction of students with faculty and entrepreneurs, in addition to proving the intense influence of university support on faculty intrapreneurship, especially in a slow-growth environment. Additionally, the authors confirmed the moderating effect of universities’ dynamic and ordinary capabilities on student interaction and university support, respectively, and some exciting differences considering the ecosystem dynamism. The fsQCA results deepened the differences between environments, presenting different configurations between the antecedents that lead to high levels of faculty intrapreneurship in fast and slow-growth environments.

The study makes a unique and significant contribution to the literature on faculty intrapreneurship by examining the cross-interactions between individual, organizational and environmental levels about the promotion of faculty intrapreneurship. From a practical point of view, it is possible to identify more effective, innovative and systematic ways to encourage faculty intrapreneurship in a developing country. The findings help open up the black box of faculty intrapreneurship.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the status of university accelerators (UAs) in Australia, expanding a similar paper on related entrepreneurship education (EE) in 2019. The aim is to review neoteric global best practice UA, aligning context and specific inference to the impact of UAs in Australia.

The authors introduce an iterative and emergent inquiry into multi-method research, including a quantitative examination of Australian UAs, Leximancer algorithmic analyses of entrepreneurial strategic intent and narratives from best practice applications.

The paper highlights the sparse and inconsistent distribution across UAs in Australia, further characterized by significant symbolic motives of operation. Furthermore, the integration of EE evidenced on global UA is not as evident in Australia, highlighting outcomes more specific to the success of nascent (student) startups as opposed to educational outcomes.

Limitations include the availability and accuracy of online documents and data, although implications have been mitigated using multi-method research design.

Despite the provision of critical grounding for practitioners and researchers in developing UAs, further research is recommended regarding the efficacy and impact of these accelerators.

This study is the first multi-methods emergent inquiry into UAs in Australia, coupled with integration of EE. The authors provide guidelines and inferences for researchers, educators, policymakers and practitioners alike as they seek to explore and act upon the impact of UAs.

The purpose of the present paper is to explore entrepreneurial learning at the centre of communities of practice.

Learning perspectives from the community of practice concept are applied to interpret and discuss results from an in-depth empirical investigation using a novel qualitative method, the Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique (ZMET), to study the entrepreneurial learning behaviour of ten coaches in a student venture incubator. The coaches are students with a certain level of entrepreneurial experience. Given their coaching roles and practices, the coaches are considered “community insiders”.

The findings show how the socially situated entrepreneurial learning of community insiders could be considered an adaptive process following multiple learning trajectories depending on with whom and about what the entrepreneur involves in social relationships.

Policy makers seeking to facilitate communities of practice should enable learning activities for community insiders and organic development in addition to networking events and support for the entire ecosystem in order to enable bridging of communities of practice.

The present paper focuses on the entrepreneurial learning of community insiders using a novel qualitative method, ZMET. The paper empirically demonstrates that community insiders learn through an adaptive process and participation in multiple communities of practice. This is both in interaction with the nascent entrepreneurs whom they coach as well as when interacting with other community insiders.

Over the past 2 decades CEO surveys have consistently identified a shortage of global leadership capability as a limiting factor in global expansion. At the same time, business schools have also come to recognize the need to develop global leadership in their graduates. The Global Leadership Expertise Development (GLED) model proposes a framework and process for developing global leadership competencies in a corporate setting. We describe how we applied this model in a higher education context, in the process transforming a more common approach to international business (IB) education into an experientially-intensive global leadership development program. Adopting elements of Kolb’ experiential learning theory (ELT) as well as concepts of instructional scaffolding and “red threads,” the program emphasizes personal development. Early analysis of the program’s impact points to substantial progress in developing global leader competencies in undergraduate business students.

This paper aims to explore the potential agency of university-based social entrepreneurship ecosystems (U-BSEEs) from a political ecology perspective. It addresses how higher education institutions can leverage their embedded role within a community to foster social entrepreneurship, by leveraging adult learning theories of andragogy and heutagogy in (social) entrepreneurship education.

This empirical study interviewed ten senior-level academics in the USA, the UK, Ireland and Australia with practical experience in the (social) entrepreneurship and social innovation space. Qualitative methods of structured interviews, coding and analysis were used as an appropriate procedure to examine the political ecology of U-BSEEs and the interconnectedness of its actors.

Key findings included criticisms of higher educations’ role in society; financial resources and university impact on stakeholders; the potential of student-based initiatives and programs leveraging andragogy and ideally heutagogy adult learning theories; and changes universities could implement to become key actors of U-BSEEs. Student engagement and cross-disciplinary work is apparently the modus operandi to successful university based ecosystem development.

Research limitations included sample size and lack of junior and mid-level academic perspectives; surveys could be conducted in future research on the topic to generate quantitative data to strengthen findings. Implications of the research suggest that universities possess the necessary resources and personnel to serve as keystone actors of an ecosystem, but currently do not leverage the expertise available to them.

All respondents concurred that focusing on students as change agents, and building social entrepreneurship education programs could foster a trophic cascade of increased collaboration, economic growth, political capital and social good in the local and regional ecosystem.

This study is original in its attempt to build on the entrepreneurship ecosystem literature by considering the agency of U-BSEEs from a political ecology lens.

This chapter examines the key characteristics of success of the university-wide entrepreneurial ecosystem at Syracuse University. From 2007 to 2012, Syracuse University developed an academic signature in entrepreneurship, innovation, and community engagement resulting from 165 programs that linked the campus and the community. Nine critical factors of success for individual programs were observed. This chapter provides recommendations for establishing an experientially focused university-wide entrepreneurship education program and suggestions on mistakes to avoid.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the microfoundations of student entrepreneurship, a cornerstone of innovation ecosystems. To this end, this paper assesses how perceived university support for entrepreneurship influences entrepreneurial characteristics and intentions in students enrolled at Amazonas and São Paulo State Universities.

A quantitative approach based on multivariate data analysis using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling was applied to a sample of 420 respondents.

Results indicate that the university environment positively influences entrepreneurial behavior and intention in students. Nonetheless, further integration between academia and external dimensions of the ecosystems is necessary to drive more intense entrepreneurial activity in students. The educational contexts of Amazonas and São Paulo present significant differences in the relationship between entrepreneurial characteristics and entrepreneurial intention with a stronger influence found for Amazonas. This finding suggests a relative lack of propensity of students from São Paulo to engage in entrepreneurial venturing.

The main limitations involve the use of non-probabilistic sampling procedures and students’ heterogeneity in terms of academic seniority.

This research offers guidance for policies targeting the generation of entrepreneurial activity in universities embedded in developing countries’ innovation ecosystems and facing distinct levels of socioeconomic development.

This research presents a novel analysis of the microfoundations driving student entrepreneurship within different educational contexts in a developing country. Results highlight the necessary conditions for universities to foster entrepreneurial activity and, incidentally, feed innovation ecosystems with entrepreneurial talent.