Although entrepreneurship can be taught in different ways, entrepreneurship education impact studies generally fall short with regard to acknowledging the teaching models of the programs they assess. This severely limits our understanding of how entrepreneurship education actually works. To address this gap, this study describes and implements a procedure to identify the teaching models of entrepreneurship education courses and shows how different teaching models are associated with entrepreneurial learning outcomes. Our analysis is based on a sample of 376 Italian university students who responded to the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey (GUESSS) and attended entrepreneurship education courses. We describe and implement a coding procedure that allows us to classify the entrepreneurship courses attended by the respondents into five different teaching models (Supply, Supply–Demand, Demand, Demand–Competence and Competence). We find that courses based on the Supply–Demand, Demand and Demand–Competence Models are associated with better entrepreneurial learning outcomes than those based on the Supply Model. Our findings contribute to the theory and practice of entrepreneurship education program evaluation and design.

An emerging theme in the entrepreneurial university (EU) literature is how universities should evolve to best reconcile their different missions, particularly research and commercialization, which often require different sets of resources. This tension is evident in the development of university spin-offs (USOs). In particular, the EU literature has generally overlooked how characteristics of university research affect USO’s early-stage access to external equity. In this study, we embrace the characterization of university research offered by literature in terms of patterns, specifically, exploration and exploitation. Through the lens of the imprinting perspective, we study the effect of exploration and exploitation in university research on the early-stage equity financing of USOs on a unique dataset that covers a sample of 739 USOs from 39 Italian public universities founded from 2011 to 2019. Our results indicate that exploration (exploitation) in research has an overall positive (negative) impact on the likelihood of USOs obtaining early-stage external equity financing. Additionally, this exploratory study offers several conceptual and practical contributions to the EU literature.

This article presents a case study of the Cooperative University of Mondragon to explore the intricate processes through which higher education institutions (HEIs) adopt an entrepreneurial university (EU) framework across their three core missions: teaching, research, and community outreach. Using a qualitative research design, this study examines the organizational strategies that Mondragon University’s engineering faculty (MGEP) employs to embrace entrepreneurial behaviors (EBs), specifically by building on its peculiar cooperative governance model. The findings shed light on how MGEP, as a prominent example, leverages a long-term vision that centers its decision-making processes on entrepreneurship and the management tools and governance elements that favor collective participation and intrinsic motivation. This research advances our understanding of the evolving landscape of higher education and its entrepreneurial drift in the following ways: (1) by addressing the need for further exploration of governance in EUs; (2) by complementing existing studies on the role of university leadership in the adoption of EBs; and (3) by identifying strategies to overcome inherent barriers within large organizations that impede universities from being entrepreneurial. Overall, this study offers practical implications for the adoption of EBs in HEIs.

Academic spin‐offs (ASOs), a distinct form of hybrid venture, operate at the intersection of economic (business) and non‐economic (academic) logics. Although traditional literature often portrays these logics as inherently conflicting, emphasizing the trade‐offs ASOs must manage, recent empirical findings challenge this view, suggesting that integrating academic and business logics can be beneficial. This paper presents a systematic review of the ASO literature, leveraging the concept of duality to explore the dynamic interplay between academic and business logics. The duality perspective underscores the importance of considering both complementarities and oppositions between seemingly incompatible logics. By synthesizing existing empirical findings, we propose a framework that clarifies how the oppositions and complementarities between academic and business logics influence ASOs’ academic and business outcomes. Our framework highlights the need for more nuanced, dynamic and multilevel approaches in studying ASOs, offering future research directions that embrace the duality perspective. This integrative view aims to inspire further investigation into hybrid ventures, illustrating how economic and non‐economic logics can jointly foster both non‐economic and economic outcomes.