Entrepreneurial decision making in academic spinoffs: a bibliometric map and research agenda

In recent decades, universities have put considerable emphasis on their ‘Third Mission’ and have thus expanded their portfolio of core activities to include activities related to university-industry collaboration and science commercialisation. An important mechanism to implement the university’s third mission is the creation of academic spinoffs that are start-ups based on research produced at universities and other public research institutions. Research on academic spinoffs has thus experienced significant growth, and several literature reviews have sought to map the often-fragmented knowledge in this topic area. Yet, we still lack an overview of the decision making of academic entrepreneurs and relevant stakeholders—an overview that is of paramount importance in the effort of scholars and policy-makers to understand what drives the creation of (more) academic spinoffs that have good chances of surviving and thriving. This paper is based on 60 papers published during the period 2003-2021 and provides a comprehensive overview of all topics covered in the body of literature on the entrepreneurial decision making of academic spinoffs, by identifying the most salient topics, papers, and trends within this literature. Our analysis shows that the literature on the topic clusters around four macro-areas: contextual factors, spinoff development and performance, nascent academic entrepreneurship, and science parks. Our study further compares and contrasts our findings with the highly influential framework for entrepreneurial decision making of Shepherd et al. (2015) and proposes future research directions in light of the unique characteristics of academic entrepreneurs and academic spinoffs

The social and environmental impact of entrepreneurship – a bibliometric and systematic review

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the broader field of entrepreneurship has developed so far when it comes to researching the impact of entrepreneurship on society and environment. The global transition to a more sustainable economy in recent decades has triggered the development of new subfields in the entrepreneurship literature, such as sustainable entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and environmental entrepreneurship. There has been considerable progress in these new research streams that consider the creation and evolution of new ventures in relation to their attempt to address bigger societal and/or environmental challenges. However, there is a need to reconsider the societal and environmental impact as not peripheral, but as central to the broader entrepreneurship as well. Therefore, we conducted a bibliometric analysis of 148 articles to understand the evolution of the academic field, adopting a comparative approach and examining different bibliometric indicators. This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by identifying the most influential journals, articles and authors, clustering the existing studies around four research areas (“social entrepreneurship and innovation”, “sustainable development and grand challenges”, “regional development and well-being”, and “female entrepreneurship”) and defining future research opportunities