Assessing the Entrepreneurial Orientation of University Departments. A Comparative Study Between Italy and Spain

Abstract

This paper aims at empirically measuring the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) of university departments and the impact it has on their ability to generate patents and spin-offs from research. Moving from a recent operazionalization of universities’ EO developed by a group of scholars in Canada, we used a web-based questionnaire to collect information from 206 heads of department of Italian and Spanish universities. Through a multiple regression analysis we assessed the relationship between departments’ EO and performance, expressed in terms of patents and spin-offs. Our findings show that the EO significantly affects the ability of university departments to generate patents and spin-offs. However, not all the dimensions we used to operationalize the EO play the same role. In this sense, our study shows that much more attention should be paid to the context-specific conditions, that can definitively affect the results and the relationships between the investigated variables. Implications, limitations and future improvements of the research are discussed.