Becoming entrepreneur without institutional support: a PhD Perspective in entrepreneurial university

Illuminated by the social information processing perspective, which postulates an interplay between individual and the surrounding context at the base of an organizational behavior, this work proposes and empirically tests a model to explain doctoral students’ decision to become entrepreneurs, that is their transition from entrepreneurial alertness to intentions. A structured questionnaire is administered to 261 doctoral students enrolled in 19 Italian universities. Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) tests for causal relationships among latent variables. Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) is adopted to clarify whether the relevance of the university support system changes with different levels of doctoral students' pro-social motivation. Our results demonstrate that the more doctoral students are endowed in terms of human capital, the more likely they are to become entrepreneurially alert. Conversely, they show that university support system does not reinforce doctoral students’ entrepreneurial decision process, but it becomes a ‘condicio sine qua non’ when doctoral students have a weak pro-social motivation. This work contributes to theory by (i) clarifying whether and how university support system actually nurtures the early stage of academic entrepreneurship, and (ii) providing a multi-level model for explaining the arising of academic entrepreneurship.