Alumni Impact Survey

Universities are an essential part of the entrepreneurship and innovation system on both the local and global scale. As such, understanding the impact of university alumni is important. Historically, the great majority of alumni studies have focused on measuring engagement and competencies, and on alumni giving (Cabrera et al. 2005). This chapter highlights the distinctly new phenomenon of alumni impact surveys, which are a relatively new tool used mostly by universities to address policy makers and future students. Much focus has been given in these studies to entrepreneurship, but it has not been well connected to the wider role of universities, or the social impact of alumni. At this moment, only seven universities have conducted alumni impact surveys. All but one are North American institutions. The execution of such large-scale surveys is expensive and time consuming. Moreover, there are many issues involving both the use of the data and its analysis in academic papers. Of the seven surveys, three have been used in five academic publications. Only one has provided a cross-university analysis. This chapter begins with a recount of the origin of alumni impact surveys, it continues with a review of the reasons for and the process of survey implementations; section four highlights the results from the surveys as they were published in university reports; section five reviews the published academic papers. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the state of alumni impact surveys.

Collaborators:

Hills, Brendan
Zhang, Qiantao

Publication:

Breznitz, S. M., Hills, B. and Zhang, Q. 2019.  “Measuring Alumni Entrepreneurial Impact: Standardizing the Practice of Alumni Impact Surveys.” In Al Link and David Audretsch Editors. A Research Agenda for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.

Despite the depth and breadth of the existing literature on university entrepreneurship, research has focused almost exclusively on licensing patents and founding spin-offs by faculty and staff. In comparison, much less evidence has been produced on start-ups created by students and graduates, mainly due to a lack of comprehensive data. This paper evaluates the impact of education—academic subject and foreign education experience—on the creation of firms by university graduates. In terms of the academic subject, the focus is on the distinction between science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields and non-STEM fields. With respect to foreign education experience, the focus is on graduates’ experience studying outside their home country. Our analysis extends the scope of existing research in two ways. First, we consider the entire education history of graduates, not just from the researched university. Second, the paper extends the traditional focus on international students and analyzes the foreign education experience of both domestic and international students. The results indicate a positive relationship between having a non-STEM degree and entrepreneurial activity. A combination of STEM and non-STEM degrees is also positively related to the entrepreneurial propensity of graduates. Students with foreign education experience are significantly more likely to become entrepreneurs than those without such experience. Many governments focus their policy on attracting and retaining foreign students, especially those with degrees in STEM fields. Our results suggest that it is more important for a government to focus on both foreign-born students and domestic students who have foreign study experience.

Collaborators:

Zhang, Qiantao

Publication:

Breznitz, S. M. and Zhang, Q. 2020. “Determinants of graduates' entrepreneurial activity.” Small Business Economics. 55(4): 1039-1056.

Many studies show that entrepreneurial education has a positive impact on and reinforces entrepreneurial intentions. However, entrepreneurial intentions are not firm formation. People who intend to become entrepreneurs will not necessarily establish firms. By using a large original dataset, this paper examines the impact of different kinds of academic and professional entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurship. The results indicate that in comparison to no entrepreneurship education at all, entrepreneurship education courses do have a positive impact on entrepreneurship in general and student entrepreneurship in particular. In addition, a combination of entrepreneurship education from different organizations, such as government agencies, incubators/accelerators, and universities, promotes the establishment of high-technology firms.

Collaborators:

Zhang, Qiantao

Publication:

Breznitz, S. M. and Zhang, Q. 2021. "Entrepreneurship education and firm creation." Regional Studies Journal. 56(6): 940-955.

Despite the large body of literature analyzing the role of international education in graduates’ entrepreneurship, little research has been undertaken about the role of international employment. Drawing on a large-scale survey of alumni of the University of Toronto, our empirical results show that, for graduates, international education experience matters more for entrepreneurship than international employment experience. For international education, the experience seems to be more important than the subject studied or the degree obtained. However, for international employment, the nature of employment, the size of the firm, or the type of firm plays a more essential role in entrepreneurship than the experience does alone.

Collaborators:

Zhang, Qiantao

Publication:

Paper under review

Opportunity recognition is strongly affected by knowledge provisions individually accumulated in life (Shane and Venkataraman 2000). Such provisions mostly depend on two processes of knowledge acquisition. A first one that rests on the stock of theoretical knowledge, i.e.: knowledge acquired while at school (university); the other that rests on experience, i.e.: pragmatic knowledge accumulated while working (after university). While the relevance of both mechanisms of knowledge accumulation to entrepreneurship is clear (Hayek 1945; Venkataraman 1997), less evidence is available on how knowledge asymmetries generated by these different types of knowledge separately and jointly contribute to the process of entrepreneurship (Shane 2000). The aim of this work is to shed light on the contribution of these two types of knowledge in the entrepreneurial process. In particular, the paper will focus upon the educational and work experiences of graduate entrepreneurs to disentangle their single and combined effects.

Collaborators:

Zhang, Qiantao
Chiara Marzocchi

Publication:

Work in progress

Findings from our previous study diverge from studies that analyze entrepreneurship characteristics, which find that men are more likely than women to establish firms (Fischer et al. 1993; Dabic et al. 2012; Gicheva and Link 2015). We find that these relationships are negative but insignificant, suggesting that some of our other variables—in particular, employment history variables, including the size of firms at which graduates are employed and holding a management position at a firm—have a stronger and positive impact on entrepreneurship. This finding is important in promoting entrepreneurship by women and as such it is the focus of this research project.

Collaborators:

Zhang, Qiantao
Mary Frank Fox

Publication:

Zhang, Q., Frank Fox M. and Breznitz. S. M. “Analyzing the impact of gender on entrepreneurship and innovation: evidence from university graduates.” The Journal of Technology Transfer. Online first, August 2024.