Promoting entrepreneurship in HEIs: Leading and facilitating university spin-off ventures

Abstract

The European Commission considers entrepreneurship a key to ensuring economic growth. Entrepreneurship competence is the ability to transform ideas and opportunities into action by mobilizing resources. Entrepreneurship education refers to a wide range of skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary to generate creative ideas, achieve goals, and create new value. Transformational leadership is positively associated with student motivation, satisfaction, academic performance, affective and cognitive learning, enhancing innovation in universities. Close cooperation with business helps HEIs to backup students developing mind-sets for the job market by driving innovation. University spin-offs constitute an economically important sub-group of high-tech start-up firms: they have, consequently, engendered substantial academic interest. The purpose of this chapter is to extend understanding of the emergence of an entrepreneurial initiative in academic context through analysis of university spin-of ventures.