A recent call has urged to broaden the conceptualization of university entrepreneurship in order to appreciate the heterogeneity of contexts and actors involved in the process of entrepreneurial creation. A gap still persists in the understanding of the variety of ventures generated by different academic stakeholders, and the relationships between these entrepreneurial developments and university missions, namely, teaching and research. This paper addresses this particular gap by looking at how university teaching and research activities influence universities' entrepreneurial ventures such as academic spin-offs and graduate start-ups. Empirically, we analyse the English higher education sector, drawing on institutional data at the university level. First, we explore the ways in which teaching and research activities are configured, and secondly, we examine how such configurations relate to academic spin-offs and graduate start-ups across different universities over time. Our findings suggest, first, that the evolution of USOs and graduate start-ups exhibit two different pathways over time; and second, that teaching and research both affect entrepreneurial ventures but their effect is different.

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Drawing on the concept of human capital externalities, this paper investigates universities' contribution to regional economies analysing two types of graduate retention: 'labour retention' (graduates employed in the region where they studied), and 'entrepreneurship retention' (graduates starting-up businesses in the region where they studied). Using a panel of English universities (2010/11-2015/16), it examines the extent to which the diversification and specialization of the knowledge that universities offer influences graduate retention rates across metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas. Findings show that agglomeration dynamics affect labour and entrepreneurship retention differently, and that HEI knowledge supply (subject specialisation) matters differently across diverse geographical contexts.

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