Extending the boundaries of academic entrepreneurship: demonstrating the instrumentality of new logics for addressing social inclusion

Academic entrepreneurship (AE) has gained widespread acclaim globally for bridging the gap between academia and industry, as well as addressing the issue of socio-economic inclusion and the impact of research. In this paper, we both relate to, and extend scholarly work in the domains of AE and social inclusion by investigating the process of AE from an interplay of institutional logics perspective, with an emphasis on the diversity strands to which academic entrepreneurs belong. Drawing on extensive fieldwork of 55 academic researchers affiliated with 6 UK universities, our findings highlight the co-existence of profession, science logic and market logic, combined with the new logics that we introduce—diversity and impact logics—in capturing value through AE for addressing social inclusion. We make an empirical and theoretical contribution by demonstrating the instrumentality of these logics as enablers and constraints on the process of AE. We also advance the theory on logics and AE by demonstrating how the intersection of logics creates different kinds of salient points and pressures for academics and university policy makers. Closely linked to this, we make policy contributions by putting forward policy insights that are bottom-up and tailored based on a thorough understanding of the experiences and views of academic entrepreneurs.