The Role of Individual Resource Capital, University Support Environment and Government Policy in Academic Entrepreneurship: Evidence from China

Abstract

There is a growing understanding that professors worldwide are engaging in academic entrepreneurship. Still, many issues remain unresolved about the personal and institutional factors that influence professors' decisions to pursue such endeavours. This study aims to understand better the factors that influence academic entrepreneurship intentions in Chinese institutions. This work creates a model associating China's university context and academic researchers' psychological characteristics with establishing academic entrepreneurship using a classic entrepreneurial model and some studies on academic entrepreneurial intention. We use Smart PLS 4.0 software and a partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) approach to evaluate the model on 364 samples from China's teaching and research universities, with the findings indicating: 1) personality, individual resource capital, and government policy can significantly affect academic entrepreneurship; 2) university support environment can both moderate the relation between government policy and academic entrepreneurship, but also university support environment can significantly affect the academic entrepreneurship directly. The findings have significant implications for China's goal to encourage more extraordinary academic entrepreneurship around universities, as well as the strategy to establish an entrepreneurial university.