The emergence of the entrepreneurial university: how to encourage students' entrepreneurship in Italy

Abstract

The aim of the thesis is to identify what is an entrepreneurial university and how this new form of entrepreneurship is spread in Italy. In particular we want to investigate how universities encourage and stimulate students to embark on an entrepreneurial career. In the first chapter we review the literature about the third mission highlighting the difficulties in its description. We provide different frameworks to analyse the specific activities of the third mission and the indicators needed to measure it. Then we introduce the concept of entrepreneurial university and its connection with the third mission. The aim of the second chapter is to understand how universities encourage students’ entrepreneurship; we provide a useful framework to describe this process that could be subdivided in three phases: the stimulation of students’ intention, the education of students and the incubation of innovative ideas. The last chapter presents a deeper analysis of the Italian situation; in particular the analysis is subdivided into two parts. First of all it has been done a direct collection of data through an analysis of all Italian universities websites. Then it has been analysed an important and recent survey about entrepreneurial intentions and behaviour of students attending Italian universities. Conclusions are drawn from the comparison of the data collected and the information taken from the survey.