Management & Marketing no. 4/2012

Towards a conceptual delimitation of academic entrepreneurship

Ramona CANTARAGIU,
Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest

Abstract. Without a unanimously accepted definition, the subject of academic entrepreneurship looks chaotic and the studies are hardly linked in order to provide a powerful theoretical framework, which would foster new researches. This paper intends to bring some light to the current debates relating to the ways in which academics can act entrepreneurially by surveying the literature and suggesting a definition, which allows it to be distinguished from other forms of entrepreneurship. The proposed definition is meant to cover all the angles by looking at value producing activities for external actors as the main basis for entrepreneurial academic initiatives. The definition is then used as the main pillar on which to build a distinct characterization of academic entrepreneurship and to disentangle this notion from the knot in which many entrepreneurship threads have been entangled: academic, commercial, social, scientific entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship.

Keyword: academic entrepreneurship, scientific entrepreneurship, commercial entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, definition.

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