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Students climbing the entrepreneurial ladder: Does university internationalization pay off?

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Abstract

The entrepreneurial university is emerging as a new archetype of higher education institution that fosters knowledge generation and transfer, contributes to local development and empowers individuals in fast-changing markets. Many institutional, strategic and organizational factors have been discussed as components or contingencies of the process that makes universities more entrepreneurial. Yet we miss an understanding of the contribution that internationalization, crucial strategy for university competitiveness, can provide to such process. Our study addresses this gap, by looking at the effect of university internationalization on students’ progressive engagement in entrepreneurship. We do so by studying internationalization along each of the three university institutional missions (teaching, research and third mission). Based on multilevel analysis on a sample of 25,855 university students across 130 European universities, our findings indicate that university internationalization matters, and with different mechanisms along the three missions; in fact, the effect of internationalization is both direct and indirect as it increases students’ human capital but also enhances the impact of traditional university support and training mechanisms in favor of students’ entrepreneurship.

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Notes

  1. GUESSS stands for Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey and investigates students’ career choice intentions across the world. See www.guesssurvey.org for further information; in particular at http://www.guesssurvey.org/e_publication_further.html more papers (published in journals included in Web of Science or Scopus that have used the GUESSS data) are available.

  2. EUMIDA was a feasibility study launched by the Research and Innovation DG in 2009 to create a European University Data Collection. Data are available online at the following address: http://datahub.io/it/dataset/eumida. Longitudinal data, starting from 2012, are available in the ETER (European Tertiary Education Register, see: http://eter.joanneum.at/imdas-eter/). Since the GUESSS data used for this analysis refer to 2011, the EUMIDA’s 2009 data (which refer to 2007–2009 time span) were chosen for a better representation of the universities in the sample.

  3. We note that this rate is likely to be an underestimation. Not all Universities that took part in GUESSS 2011 might have invited all of their students. Unfortunately, reliable estimates are not available for all Universities. The response rate has been calculated as accurately as possible (Sieger et al. 2011). We acknowledge that this might be a limitation of our data set, but given the uniqueness of the sample in terms of geographical scope and number of responses we believe that the benefits of using GUESSS data more than outweigh its disadvantages.

  4. EUMIDA data were classified according to the ISCED 1997. ISCED classification was revised in 2011, so that level 5-1997 is now split into 5, 6 and 7, while item 6-1997 is now item 8.

  5. SviVal is the Elsevier’s database of peer-reviewed literature, which guarantees an extensive coverage of research output for most scientific disciplines.

  6. SciVal allows to track back publications back to 1996. The choice of the most recent 5 years, covering the surveyed period, seems to be the most appropriate to evaluate internationalization at the time of the student’s answers. The same reasoning applies for the subsequent indicator: the number of international spin-off; it is established on a time span that includes the year 2011.

  7. European universities report documentation on their spin-off activities in different forms. A list of all documentation employed for the construction of the ‘International spin-off' dummy is available on request.

  8. The variable created in such a fashion is then standardized to have zero mean and one standard deviation, when used for the empirical analysis.

  9. The mean VIF is equal to 1.43, with the highest value being 2.07.

  10. Details on the construction of the principal component variables are available on request.

  11. This result is estimated in an OLS regression where the university entrepreneurial support is regressed against the full set of regressors used in former analyses.

  12. This coefficient is estimated in an OLS regression where the ratio of international students to total students is estimated against the full set of regressors used in former analyses.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Philipp Sieger, Massimo Colombo, the participants to the 3rd DREAMT-CYFE Doctoral and Young Researcher Workshop (May 2015) and to the Eu-SPRI ECC (Early Career Researcher) Conference (June 2015) for the feedbacks received on earlier versions of this manuscript; the support of Elsevier’s SciVal that has provided access to the data at institutional level is also acknowledged.

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  1. Department of Management, Information and Production Engineering, University of Bergamo, Via Pasubio 7b, 24044, Dalmine, BG, Italy

    Tommaso Minola & Michele Meoli

  2. CYFE - Center for Young and Family Enterprise, University of Bergamo, Via Salvecchio 19, 24129, Bergamo, BG, Italy

    Tommaso Minola

  3. CCSE - Cisalpino Institute for Comparative Studies in Europe, HERe - Higher Education Research group, University of Bergamo, Via Salvecchio 19, 24129, Bergamo, BG, Italy

    Davide Donina & Michele Meoli

  4. Department of Economics and Management, University of Pavia, Via San Felice 5, 27100, Pavia, Italy

    Davide Donina

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Minola, T., Donina, D. & Meoli, M. Students climbing the entrepreneurial ladder: Does university internationalization pay off?. Small Bus Econ 47, 565–587 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-016-9758-1

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