Despite their significance, firms created by students have been the subject of little research. Adopting the entrepreneurial ecosystem framework, this paper examines the growth of student start-ups, especially those that participate in university accelerators. Focused on the University of Toronto, this paper contributes to an understanding of how university accelerators can better support the entrepreneurial efforts of students. It is clear that firms that participate in accelerators with a screening process have a stronger performance in both employment and product growth. Moreover, a habitual entrepreneur director or a more intensive accelerator program is found to have more positive effects on product growth at firms than on employment growth.

Universities are no longer considered to be isolated islands of knowledge, but as institutions increasingly engaged with a range of external partners through entrepreneurial activities. This paper examines the associations between the intensity and performance of knowledge exchange activities undertaken in UK universities with non-academic actors. Drawing on data concerning the structural factors of interactions of universities in the UK with external partners, the paper sheds further light on the nature of these activities through a prism of competitive and uncompetitive regions in order to better understand how universities may be able to leverage both their knowledge and partnerships more effectively as competitive assets. On the one hand, it is found that academics in uncompetitive regions are more intensively engaged in entrepreneurial activities but generate less income from them than their counterparts in competitive regions, suggesting that there are differences in the income-generating capacity of academics across regions. On the other hand, academic knowledge is found to be more strongly bounded within a certain distance in uncompetitive regions whilst geographical distance seems less of a hindrance to academics in competitive regions.

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We provide, for the first time, a disaggregated input output table for Irish higher education. Using this we constructed Type I and Type II multipliers for gross output. We find that Irish higher education institutions (HEI's) have high, but explicable, Type II multipliers. Taking account of the government budget constraint we further decomposed the Type II multipliers into state and non---state impacts. The picture painted overall is of a higher education sector that adds considerable gross value to the economy, whether via state or other income. The gross income of Irish HEIs, a total of €2.6b in 2010---11, generated gross output nationwide of €10.5b.