University support initiatives and development of academic entrepreneurial intent: The role of Start-up competitions

Academic spin-offs are attracting increasing attention by researchers and policy makers. As a consequence of the non commercial environment of the universities (Siegel et al., 2003), researchers face a number of significant barriers in creating new ventures (Vohora et al., 2004). The main obstacle concerns the change of mentality and role that is required to a researcher and then the development of an entrepreneurial intention and a real entrepreneurial commitment (Vohora et al., 2004). In this context, previous positive experience and success stories of colleagues in the creation of spin-off, as a result of geographical and cognitive proximity, could create the motivation and promote, among academic community, a positive humus about entrepreneurship. In the last years, many universities have promoted initiatives and policies aiming to stimulate the creation of academic spin-offs, such as start-up competitions. In our opinion, in addition to the direct effect on the winners, the result of start-up competition could have an indirect positive impact on university and academic community as a whole: the winning of a start-up competition could make other researchers more comfortable with the idea to start an academic spin-off. The objective of the paper is to analyze how the results obtained by researchers in start-up competition influence the entrepreneurial intentions and commitment among university community. The research shows that start-up competition could have a positive impact on entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurial commitment among researchers becoming to the same university of the winner. The winning of a “colleague” in a competition and the storytelling of success stories, stimulate other researchers to try the entrepreneurial experience, through the participation into a start-up competition and, sometimes, through the creation of a new firm. Implications of the study might be that investing in start-up competition is a useful mechanism to lower the level of uncertainty about more appropriate organizational structure of new high tech ventures (Langlois, 2007), and facilitate the flow of a positive discourse about entrepreneurship at a local level (Hjort, 2003)