ACADEMIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND ORGANISATIONAL SUPPORT FACTORS

Academic entrepreneurship has gained popularity in recent decades as a critical element for the advancement of commercialisation and innovation. Research shows that the organisational context can facilitate or impede academic entrepreneurship. However, academics are often faced with a weak set of institutional and organisational factors which inhibit the commercialisation and technology innovation process. This article builds in the direction of an emerging stream of research and empirically investigates the relationship between various factors such as management support, rewards, and time allocation in relation to measurable academic entrepreneurship outputs. Following a survey of academics, the results reveal several positive relationships between the hypothesised study variables. In particular, rewards were found to have a significant impact on academic entrepreneurship outputs. Implications relate to management interventions to design and implement harmonised academic entrepreneurship support mechanisms which focus on organisational rewards and incentives.