Nikolay Sterev
University of National and World Economy
https://doi.org/10.53656/str2023-3s-7-pre
Abstract. The economic growth and development becomes more and more dependent of the innovation and technology transfer nowadays. Thus, the focus of the common economical and educational policy is moved on development talents and the policy instruments are built to search for innovation signs from the students’ bench. So, not just the Universities, but business as well, are given the priority to develop entrepreneurial training and to foster academic entrepreneurship. Accordingly, a lot of digital tools are developing not just to find academic entrepreneurs at their early stage but to create appropriate knowledge helping them to avoid the entrepreneurial “valley of death”. The paper aims to give a discussion on the main characteristics of the academic entrepreneurs and academic entrepreneurship that are used as a focal point to foster the academic innovations development at the early stage of the pre-incubation. The main thesis is that the (Bulgarian) Universities could be a successful entrepreneurial pool as they develop and use appropriate digital pre-incubation tools.
Keywords: academic entrepreneurship; pre-incubation; entrepreneurial mindset; (Bulgarian) universities
