Modelling Contextualised Entrepreneurial Development

Research impact is an international concern. Commercialisation of research, whilst being only one way of measuring research impact, is of utmost importance in strengthening the future of university institutions. The concept of the ‘Entrepreneurial University’ affords special significance of university institutions in economic, environmental and social prosperity – and therefore in most entrepreneurship ecosystems; yet, importantly, the academic researcher is framed as an ‘agent of change’ rather than ‘entrepreneur’. In the context of (UK) Higher Education, much research space on enterprise education is devoted to the efficacy and impact of enterprise education programmes and large-scale business competitions; however, these tend to be more focused towards undergraduate student populations. In the context of academic researchers, we argue the ‘Entrepreneurial Intent’ model does not adequately capture the context and instead we share the development of a robust evaluation instrument for ‘Commercialisation Intent’. This is adaptable for use in different research contexts and helps to understand the impact of researcher development interventions on the intentionality (and therefore predicted potentiality) to commercialise their research.