Since the enactment of the Bayh-dole Act in the USA in 1980, there has been a substantial rise in commercialisation of science created by universities in the USA (Grimaldi et al., 2011) in Europe (Maia & Claro, 2013; McAdam et al., 2016) and Asia (Zhang et al., 2013). These marketable actions are known as academic entrepreneurship and comprise the Knowledge and Technology Transfer activities between universities and industries. They constitute the third mission of universities apart from teaching and researching (Clark, 1998; Etzkowitz, 1998). They are defined as the interchange of new knowledge, products, and processes from one organization to another for the economic benefit of both parts (Decter et al., 2007). They include generation of new ideas, creation of USOs, intellectual property, and technology licences.
In the last twenty years, due to the recent world financial crisis and an increasingly competitive global marketplace, legislators have been adopting policies to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship in the hope of producing economic growth (Autio et al., 2014). Universities have been the target of these policies (Morgan, 2007; Nicolaou & Birley, 2003), given their ability to stimulate the production and diffusion of new knowledge and act as catalysts of innovation across their regions (Nicolaou & Birley, 2003; Wright, 2014). As a consequence, universities are increasingly adopting a stronger entrepreneurship and innovation profile and reputation in order to provide a wider social and economic benefit to their territories (Siegel & Wright, 2015). It has given birth to the entrepreneurial university (Guerrero et al., 2014, 2016). This new model is characterized by providing a supportive ecosystem to the university community and its surroundings, in order to produce, diffuse, absorb, and use new knowledge that could become entrepreneurial initiatives (Carree et al., 2014; Guerrero et al., 2014).
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