The Effects of the Academic Environment on PhD Entrepreneurship: New Insights from Survey Data

This paper investigates PhD entrepreneurship. We focus on the university factors most closely associated to: (1) students’ success in starting a business venture; (2) students’ startup intention; (3) students’ abandoning the entrepreneurial idea. The empirical analysis is based on data from a questionnaire survey, administered in 2016 in Italy. We focus on four factors related to the university entrepreneurial environment: (1) university entrepreneurship policy frameworks; (2) PhD orientation to business problems; (3) entrepreneurship training; (4) PhD lab reputation. We find that the academic environment can have a fundamental impact on students’ decisions to start new ventures and on their entrepreneurial attitude.