Role of universities in early graduate entrepreneurship: enablers or constrainers of ‘missing’ entrepreneurs?

Abstract

We explore how student entrepreneurship ecosystems enable or constrain the entrepreneurial activities of recent university graduates, with a focus on ‘missing’ entrepreneurs with non-mainstream characteristics. We argue that today’s university, with its emphasis on equality, diversity and inclusivity, is an important vehicle for enabling this ‘missing’ entrepreneurship and its economic impacts. Our analysis is based on the quantitative study of large-scale micro-data from the UK Graduate Outcomes survey, and a newly assembled university-level database. Our results indicate that student entrepreneurship ecosystems are critical drivers of entrepreneurship among university graduates with non-conventional entrepreneurial profiles in terms of gender, ethnicity and socio-economic background.