University business idea incubation and stakeholders' engagement: closing the gap between theory and practice

Abstract

PurposeThe paper aims to contributes on the debates about University Idea Incubation by investigating the role and the engagement of different University's stakeholders in the process of opportunity recognition in an entrepreneurship education program targeted at students with an interdisciplinary background.Design/methodology/approachThrough a longitudinal case study methodology, the Contamination Lab at University of Salento (Lecce, Italy), the learning approaches and the knowledge process to create an entrepreneurial awareness, mindset and capability in students with different educational background are presented.FindingsThe findings demonstrates the crucial role of stakeholders' engagement for business idea presentation, open innovation challenge, contamination workshop on specialized topics, enterprise projects are important vehicle for effective students' business ideas and innovative projects development in a multidisciplinary environment. The close interaction among students, academia, companies and institutions creates a favourable environment that enables opportunity identification, idea generation through a deep contamination of knowledge, skills and experiences.Research limitations/implicationsLimitations include the need to generalise the results even if this limitation is typical of the case study methodology. Other research is necessary for an in-depth analysis in deep of the other Contamination Lab in Italy and to derive the “invariance traits” of this environment according to the features of the local entrepreneurial ecosystems.Practical implicationsImplications for practices include recommendations for designing innovative programs where the interactions between University-Institutions-Industry are realized.Originality/valueA conceptual framework is proposed by defining all the entrepreneurial knowledge process and knowledge creation within the Contamination Lab, highlighting the contribution of the stakeholders in each phase and learning initiative of the program.

Innovation hub a venture for students’ entrepreneurial talents: a case of college of business education

“…These study findings align with some previous studies by (Dahlstrand & Berggren, 2010;Lerro & Schiuma, 2022;Mgaiwa, 2021;Secundo, Mele, Passiante, & Albergo, 2021) which suggested that incubation and innovation hubs should be established for the sake of creating and developing entrepreneur mind-sets among students while considering its configuration with respect to the market requirements, innovation, leverage of technology, shifting of training practices, and fully engagement of key stakeholders.…”

Identifying Constituent Elements of Entrepreneurship Curricula: A Systematic Literature Review

“…As the entrepreneurship process can be subdivided into numerous partial tasks, these could also be used as entrepreneurial subprojects. For example, students could work on brand name and logo development, business idea development (Secundo et al 2023), business model development (Bolzani and Luppi 2021;Hasche and Linton 2021;Snihur et al 2021), company registration, entrepreneurial marketing (Amjad et al 2020; Thanasi-Boçe 2020), (minimum viable) product/service development (White and Kennedy 2022; Wu and Chen 2021), etc. Apart from subdividing the whole entrepreneurship process into partial projects, a more demanding approach, for both students and instructors, is to undergo the whole process from idea to market.…”

Pengembangan Laboratorium Bisnis Digital Sebagai Pra Inkubator Bisnis Untuk Meningkatkan Kreativitas Kewirausahaan Mahasiswa FE Unimed

“…Laboratorium bisnis digital juga memberikan lingkungan yang kolaboratif dan inovatif di mana mahasiswa dapat berinteraksi dengan sesama mahasiswa, dosen, dan profesional bisnis (Shih & Aaboen, 2019). Menurut (Secundo et al, 2021) kolaborasi ini dapat meningkatkan pertukaran ide, pembelajaran, dan pengembangan jaringan bisnis yang berharga bagi mahasiswa.…”