The entrepreneurial university, academic activities and technology and knowledge transfer in four European countries

•Research is done among academics from all scientific disciplines.•Understanding an entrepreneurial university through the eyes of an academic.•Academics are still divided about the attitude towards entrepreneurial university.•Entrepreneurial university does not distract academic from traditional activities.•Providing a complete picture of academics’ engagement in various activities.

This paper aims to provide an insight into academics’ perceptions of an entrepreneurial university. In spite of all the initiatives, environmental changes and desire to create entrepreneurial universities, there is limited research on how the entrepreneurial orientation within a university may influence academics’ engagement in different activities. Based on analyzing academics’ survey responses at four European universities (University of Amsterdam, University of Antwerp, University of Ljubljana and the University of Oxford), our findings indicate that more academics in the natural sciences perceive their university department as being highly entrepreneurially oriented than their counterparts in the social sciences. The results also reveal that perceiving a university department as having a high or low entrepreneurial orientation may have a significant effect on whether an academic would engage in some activities that are more entrepreneurial in nature, but a negligible effect on whether an academic would engage in more traditional activities. Further, academics perceiving their university department as being highly entrepreneurially oriented are less likely to believe that engagement in technology and knowledge transfer can be harmful to academic science. At the end, the implications, limitations and future research areas are discussed.