This licentiate thesis deals with the questions if and how entrepreneurship education and access to research at university stimulate student start-ups. The phenomenon of student entrepreneurs is approached in three empirical studies. In the first study mail questionnaires were sent out to former entrepreneurship students at three universities in Sweden, in order to find out if the students’ entrepreneurial behaviour was influenced by education. The second study explores differences in communication skills and the handling of liabilities of newness between entrepreneurs with entrepreneurship education at university and/or previous start-up experience. Student entrepreneurs are compared with a control group of randomly chosen Swedish entrepreneurs. In the third study, the influence from university research on student entrepreneurship as well as direct and indirect regional effects are examined through interviews with university spin-offs around Halmstad University. Entrepreneurship education at university is found to influence entrepreneurial behaviour, to increase the student’s awareness of business opportunities and to result in high start-up frequency early in life. The student entrepreneurs perceive fewer problems to handle some aspects of liability of newness as well as communicative skills in terms of openness and adaptation. Other-orientation is on the other hand supported by previous start-up experience. Hence, with experience from both entrepreneurship education and previous start-up, the students seem well prepared for future start-ups. The case study show multiple and long term indirect effects from student entrepreneurship in developing an entrepreneurial region. Established student entrepreneurs support less experienced student entrepreneurs by linking them to supplementary resources. Students are found to shoulder an important role as academic entrepreneurs in interaction with other individuals connected to the university.

The ongoing discussion about academic research not being sufficiently commercialized has overlooked the individual actors in the university context, not least students as potential entrepreneurs. The purpose of this thesis is to enhance our understanding of student entrepreneurs by exploring how entrepreneurship education and key actors in the university context facilitate the formation of student start-ups. Two overall research questions are in focus; i) How does entrepreneurship education at university facilitate start-up formation among students? ii) How and why do key actors in the university context facilitate the formation of student start-ups? These questions are answered by three sub-studies, presented in the five published and appended papers. The data were collected through postal questionnaires as well as interviews in the context of three universities, namely Halmstad University, Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg.

This thesis makes several contributions. Firstly, it shows that entrepreneurship education at university facilitates start-ups by enabling knowledge spillovers from research to students willing to take on the entrepreneurial role, the so-called missing link in academic entrepreneurship. Secondly, it also demonstrates that entrepreneurship education contributes to the development of long-term entrepreneurial capital, which facilitates future start-ups. Thirdly, entrepreneurship education facilitates start-ups by connecting key actors with different roles; students were found to be present, prepared and persistent entrepreneurs, alumni to be resource-providers and role models, while researchers became enablers with a need for utilization of their research. The revealed reasons for these interconnected key actors to enable student start-ups were; i) students are looking for a career, have start-ups skills from entrepreneurship education and access to role-models and business opportunities in the university context; ii) alumni are anxious to pass on their business experience and maintain the mutually beneficial ties to the university; iii) researchers are reluctant to change their established career but with a strong need for utilization of their research enables students to make commercial use of it.