Promoting or preventing academic entrepreneurship? The effect of regulatory focus on academic leader’s and scientists’ entrepreneurial behaviours

Drawing on theories of regulatory focus, leadership and entrepreneurship, we propose a conceptual model that explains why academic leaders and scientists make differing entrepreneurial choices when exploiting university innovations. By acknowledging that different regulatory foci are elicited by academic leaders via their behaviours, this paper suggests that these leaders influence the motivations of scientists to act entrepreneurially through priming effects. In turn these effects influence the entrepreneurial behaviour of scientists, leading to differing outcomes when viewed across a spectrum of exploitation mechanisms.