ABSTRACT
Policy makers worldwide want a strong relationship between academia and business, and universities’ contributions to innovation and social change have become their ‘third mission’, in addition to teaching and research (Etzkowitz, 1998). This new role gives reality to the university–industry interface as a collaborative arena where knowledge is produced, developed and transferred, in an interaction between an education sphere and a market sphere. Academic entrepreneurship is a research field that concerns this interface, and various concepts have been introduced in recent years: entrepreneurial university (Etzkowitz, 2003; Martinelli, Meyer and Tunzelmann, 2008; D’Este and Permann, 2010), academic entrepreneurship (O’Shea et al. 2005; Wood, 2009) university spin outs/academic spin-offs (Djokovic and Souitaris, 2008; Müller, 2010), university–industry relations (Ponomariov, 2008), academic–firm interface (Murray, 2004) patenting (Gittelmann, 2007), academic consulting (Perkmann and Walsh, 2008), technology transfer (Grimpe and Fier, 2009; Muscio, 2010; Bicknell, Francis-Smythe and Arthur, 2010), commercialisation of science (Rosser, 2009; Rosa and Dawson, 2006). Whereas current research has explored the antecedents of the entrepreneurial university and the effects of university spin outs on industries and regions, the art and form of collaborative aspects of the university–industry interface can be viewed as a discourse in its own right that has not yet been scrutinised.
