12 - Academic Entrepreneurship in Europe

Summary

Introduction

In principle, the academic world can foster entrepreneurship in two manners. First, as advocated in Chapter 8, faculty and doctoral candidates working in specific academic disciplines, such as technical, computer, or medical sciences, can commercialize their research results, for instance as entrepreneurs. The second manner is much less studied. It comes down to creating awareness of entrepreneurial opportunities and teaching the needed skills to students, which is the topic of this chapter.

In Section 12.2, I illustrate why entrepreneurship is to be stimulated in schools, in particular in Europe. I then show, based on economic theory (Section 12.3) and recent empirical evidence (Section 12.4) that the returns to education are very high for entrepreneurs, relative to employees. This leads, under some assumptions, to specific policy and research implications (Section 12.5). The bottom line of these implication, is that entrepreneurship can best be stimulated at institutions of higher education, that is, universities. Therefore, entrepreneurship education and awareness programs, in whatever form, should become part of academic curricula. Experiments to determine which sorts of programs are effective should be made possible by university administrators and stimulated by public policymakers. Moreover, novel research is required to determine which types of schools and universities should stimulate entrepreneurship, and which particular entrepreneurial competencies should be taught at what stage of the educational system.