Collaboration with entrepreneurship education programmes: building spinout capacity at universities

As University Spinouts (USOs) have become a highly desirable outcome for commercialisation efforts, the development of entrepreneurial capacity within the university system becomes increasingly more important. We hypothesise that Entrepreneurship Education (EE) programmes ceterus paribus may play a role in developing this capacity. This paper examines the attitudes and perceptions of academics who are directly involved in the field of EE programmes with four research goals in mind: 1) to determine whether or not there are perceived advantages to collaboration between EE programmes and technology transfer departments; 2) to identify specific factors that influence these perceptions; 3) to query academics regarding the perceived barriers to collaboration; 4) to identify whether collaborations already exist and categorise them. Our findings suggest that significant advantages from collaboration between these two functions are perceived and that indirect linkages are believed to be more important than direct linkages.