Empirical analysis of entrepreneurial education in US universities

The consideration of entrepreneurship as a subject that can be taught in universities is widely accepted. Consequently, the number of entrepreneurship courses offered by American universities steeply increased from a negligible amount in 1970 to more than 2,200 courses in 2003. Universities should make important strategic decisions to develop an entrepreneurial environment. The aim of this paper is to study these decisions by analyzing the impact of university research (quantified using research expenditure), Technology Transfer Office (quantified using the number of employees) and professors' profiles (quantified using their entrepreneurial experience, the scientific level of their researches and their relational capital) on the creation of patents and academic spinoffs in the US. For this research, the Association of University Technology Manager (AUTM) database was employed as initial data source. This database was intersected with the Times Higher Education (THE) world ranking to create a selection of 80 US universities. For these universities, we extracted 787 entrepreneurship professors and their attributes. The relevance of this piece of work stems from the need to understand with more reliability the effects of university strategies on entrepreneurial outcomes. Especially, understanding the role and impact of entrepreneurship professor