Technological Aspect of Academic and Educational Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is the process of creating, developing, and transforming a product, service, or system through demonstrating enterprise behavior and conducting utility and value creation activities (Galloway & Brown, 2002). According to another definition, entrepreneurship is the journey of creating economic value and employment by developing a product or service with the inherent creative power of humanity (Audretsch, 2012; Drucker, 1986). Innovations throughout humanity have subsumed the factors that direct the individual; the entrepreneur who leads the enterprise in this journey (Bygrave & Hofer, 1992). For example, while the primary capital of the industrial society encompasses muscle power and natural resources, the capital of the information society is depicted by the knowledge and the knowledge production capacity of people (Castells, 2004; Drucker, 1986). Therefore, the process of change from an industrial to an information society is an important milestone for entrepreneurship. In this context, educational entrepreneurship (edupreneur) and academic entrepreneurship (academicpreneur) concepts, two terminologies widely used in the literature, attract considerable attention. While an academic entrepreneur is defined as a university lecturer who establishes a new company or institution based on technologies derived from university research or commercializes a research project with high-income expectations (Lacetera, 2009), educational entrepreneur is also defined as the change agent (Hess, 2007) who presents innovative methods with his knowledge and experience in order to create permanent change. Actually, edupreneurs are expected to be the leaders in establishing a new education mindset in line with the needs of the twenty-first century.