Staying on topic: How research knowledge spills over via university education to regional entrepreneurial activity

Entrepreneurship is an important driver of regional economic development. Universities contribute to this goal by conducting state-of-the-art research and educating talent. The academic and policy debate regarding innovative start-up firms has primarily focused on how the outputs of research can be translated into entrepreneurial activities. In contrast, the role of education in fostering entrepreneurial activity has received comparatively little attention. As such, it remains unknown which task of a university is more important for innovative entrepreneurship in a region: research or education. Further, existing research on academic entrepreneurship has largely focused on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) or the life sciences (LS), but innovative start-up firms in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) domain are understudied. Furthermore, while entrepreneurship education is seen as an important method to promote innovative entrepreneurial activity, little attention has been paid to its effectiveness in achieving this goal. Hence, we pose the following question: What is the influence of university education and research on the level of regional innovative entrepreneurial activities within a given topic? We make education, research, and entrepreneurship data comparable across specific topics in a region, by applying topic models to course descriptions and publication abstracts from two universities in the Netherlands, as well as to innovative start-up firm descriptions from the two regions in which these universities are located.We show that both research and education foster innovative entrepreneurial activity, but that the effect of education is much stronger than that of research. Second, we find that education mediates the positive effect of research on innovative entrepreneurship. Third, we observe that innovative entrepreneurial activities are highest in the SSH domain. Finally, we find evidence that providing practical entrepreneurship education is beneficial for innovative entrepreneurial activity. This effect appears particularly strong in the LS and, to a lesser extent, in the STEM domain. Our findings indicate that more attention to the impact of education and pedagogical approaches is warranted to promote innovative entrepreneurial activity.