In this chapter, we examine academic entrepreneurship in the context of an accelerator program in which mentors guide university scientists to become academic entrepreneurs. Building upon two prior narratives of start-up entrepreneurships in Finland, we present an alternative narrative of the start-up world. Using the critical sensemaking (CSM) perspective, we contribute to academic entrepreneurship research by exploring how the scientists struggled to make sense and construct their credibility as academic entrepreneurs in the start-up accelerator context. Based on the qualitative analysis of the interaction between three start-up teams and their mentors, we constructed a composite narrative that illustrates how the academic entrepreneurs with scientific backgrounds learned the rules of the start-up game while partly questioning those rules at the same time. The study offers an alternative narrative to the existing research narratives of the Finnish start-up world; it provides insight into the heroic cultural images of start-up entrepreneurship.
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Front Matter
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Part I: Higher education policy and administration on the move
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Part II: Entrepreneurial universities claiming their future
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Part III: Discomforting and delighting: The student experience of academic entrepreneurship
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Part IV: Academics becoming entrepreneurs
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Part V: Future movements
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Part VI: Epilogue
