How do working conditions, network relationships, and institutional support offers effect entrepreneurial intentions of German university scientists?

In this paper, we study whether and how (i) working conditions, (ii) network relationships, and (iii) institutional support offers simultaneously relate to entrepreneurial intentions among German university scientists. Using unique, representative data collected from 5992 academic scientists at 73 German universities, we find that entrepreneurial peers and monetary incentives have a positive effect on university scientists' engagement in entrepreneurship. Moreover, we show that networks have a substantial impact on entrepreneurial intentions. We also provide evidence for our hypothesis suggesting that, from a certain network size onwards, the positive effect on the entrepreneurial intentions diminishes. However, although hypothesized, our results do not indicate that the propensity for entrepreneurship rises exponentially with an increasing number of institutional support offers in universities. That is, a broad range of offers covering all the pre-founding phases does not seem to have a stronger impact on university scientists' intentions to switch into entrepreneurship than individual isolated offers.