Business Commons^™

Expanding University Entrepreneurial Ecosystems To Under-Represented Communities, Emma O'Brien, Thomas M. Cooney, Per Blenker

Articles

Purpose – Entrepreneurship education has moved from an elitist view focussing on a start-up and picking-the-winners philosophy towards a broader enterprising behaviour approach; recognising entrepreneurship as an activity of relevance for everybody. The purpose of this paper is to extend this development and identify how university entrepreneurial ecosystems can be expanded to support communities that are under-represented in entrepreneurship.

Design/methodology/approach – Based on an integrative literature review (Torraco, 2005), this paper draws together and synthesises literature from the field of entrepreneurship, higher education studies and under-represented communities in an integrated fashion, leading to the development of a new conceptual model. …

The Contribution Of Higher Education-Based Technology Start-Up Incubators To The Co-Production Of Knowledge, Innovation And Growth: Experiences From The Edge, Anthony Paul Buckley, Stephen Davis

Articles

Start-up incubators are one of a number of micropolicy interventions used by states to support their technology entrepreneurs. Since 2000, the number of incubators in the United States has almost trebled while that in Europe has more than doubled. This article outlines the challenges involved in attempting to evaluate the contribution of the higher education technology start-up incubator process. It advocates theory-based evaluation (TBE) methodology as a possible solution for effective evaluation (and policy learning) in complex research settings such as this, where a study is unable, for myriad reasons, to meet the stringent requirements of experimental research design. TBE …