Universities' institutional settings and academic entrepreneurship: Notes from a developing country

The evolving role of universities drives attention to initiatives aiming at making these institutions hubs of entrepreneurial activity. Nonetheless, literature has defied the extent of these changes, thus calling for further approaches dealing with the heterogeneous nature of contextual influences on academic entrepreneurship. Aiming at disentangling the role of the academic environment upon academic entrepreneurship, this article evaluates impacts associated with university-level institutional settings. We draw from a dataset that contains information from 680 faculty members of 70 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) located across 22 Brazilian States. Estimations of econometric models account for entrepreneurial activity, innovation-driven entrepreneurship and high-growth new ventures. Results highlight the lack of significance in most institutional variables, suggesting some level of ineffectiveness in initiatives aiming at promoting academic entrepreneurship in Brazilian universities. Main implications are related to the difficulty in adapting strategies that proved successful in specific universities from the context of developed countries. •Developing countries have idiosyncratic dynamics of academic entrepreneurship.•Challenges remain for the promotion of academic entrepreneurship in these countries.•Universities still navigate among distinct strategies to become entrepreneurial.•Research activity does not imply higher levels of academic entrepreneurship.•Academic entrepreneurship is also shaped by elements exogenous to the university.