Academic entrepreneurship through technology transfer: exploring doctoral students’ motivation, social context, and entrepreneurial decision patterns

Abstract This paper focuses on technology transfer through academic entrepreneurship, exploring how doctoral students’ motivations, social context, and institutional environment influence their entrepreneurial decisions to launch a business, thereby contributing to research-driven innovation. Through semi-structured interviews with 28 doctoral students who have launched ventures, this study identifies two distinct entrepreneurial decision-making patterns among doctoral students: the ‘inner push’, driven by intrinsic motivation and personal ownership of ideas, and the ‘social pull’, shaped by external influences such as supervisors and peer networks. By examining the interplay of personal and social influences, we advance the understanding of academic entrepreneurship and doctoral students’ role in technology transfer. It demonstrates how different patterns encourage entrepreneurial behavior, with an emphasis on the “inner push” from personal motivations. Our findings suggest that universities need to develop support tools to nurture the early stage of doctoral students’ entrepreneurial process, starting with the recognition of the importance of their motivations and the social context in which they operate. Creating an environment conducive to technology transfer enables doctoral students to translate research into ventures, contributing to societal progress and economic growth.