The Entrepreneurial Architecture from a Researcher's Point of View

Abstract: The official third mission of universities urges actors within higher education to contribute to social and economic development by encouraging researchers to commercialise their findings. Even so, both practical evidence and research findings are pointing toward issues within the university's management of this task. A greater understanding of how universities can affect their researchers to pursue commercialisation is therefore of relevance. At the same time, research within Academic Entrepreneurial Intentions illustrates that researchers' perception of their environment has implications for what entrepreneurial activities they pursue, where recent emphasis has been made on the importance of understanding how contextual variables in combination affect researchers' entrepreneurial intention to pursue commercialisation activities. To address these issues, the theory of Entrepreneurial Architecture is applied to gain a better understanding of how the organisational support within universities collectively can affect researchers' intentions. More specifically, its five elements - structure, systems, leadership, strategy, and culture - are investigated by looking at their combined effect on entrepreneurial intentions. To gain a deeper understanding of how university support influences, the theory's assumption of a desired balance between the elements is for the first time tested against researchers' intentions. The thesis takes a quantitative methodology by conducting a self-completing questionnaire where 615 researchers within science and engineering at five Swedish universities are surveyed. The results of the study indicate that leadership has a positive effect, strategy has a negative effect, and the remaining three have no significant effect on entrepreneurial intentions to pursue commercialisation activities. The results further suggest that a balance between the elements is not necessary to effectively impact intentions, which provides theoretical novelty to the concept and suggestions for future research. Practically, it is suggested for university management aiming for increased commercialisation to prioritise primarily support from leadership.