Is a favorable entrepreneurial climate enough to become an entrepreneurial university? An international study with GUESSS data

Abstract

Universities play a key role not only in the generation and diffusion of knowledge but also in the creation of companies. Despite the growing importance of entrepreneurship in universities in modern societies, the research literature examining this phenomenon is still at an incipient stage. Although the relationship between entrepreneurshiporiented training and its transformation into intentions has been well studied, there is an important gap in the study of its impact on final entrepreneurial behavior. Therefore, the aim of this work is to evaluate the potential moderating effect of a climate favorable to entrepreneurship in the university environment on the relationship between entrepreneurship-oriented training and entrepreneurial behavior. For this purpose, a simple theoretical model is proposed that describes these relationships and it is contrasted using PLS techniques at meso level, taking the university institution as the main unit of analysis, addressing in this way the claims of Fayolle and Li˜n´an (2014) and Lortie and Castogiovanni (2015), to understand the phenomenon at this level.