How does academia influence Ph.D. entrepreneurship? New insights on the entrepreneurial university

This work investigates the factors that affect the propensity of Ph.D. students to create their own firms. The paper uses data from the responses to 9062 questionnaires, administered in 2016 to Ph.D. students in Italy, focusing on five factors: the entrepreneurial environment; the existence of university policy frameworks dedicated to entrepreneurship; the degree of applicability of the doctoral research to an industry context; student-industry collaboration during the doctoral study period; inclusion in the Ph.D. programme of courses on entrepreneurship. The empirical evidence shows that both university- and course-level factors have a fundamental impact on students’ decisions to start new ventures.