The economic and institutional transformations experienced by the main industrialized countries during the last few decades have led to a re-evaluation of the entrepreneur's role in economic development and wealth creation. Entrepreneurial firms play a crucial role in modern advanced economies as important engines of economic development and as vehicles for innovation. Several documents by the EU and OECD have emphasized the importance of entrepreneurship for their member countries in the development and adaptation of economic systems at local and national level.

Academic spin-offs, i.e. new companies that evolve out from universities as a result of the process of technology transfer from research to commercialization of new products or services, are receiving increasing attention from researches and policy makers. Academic spin-offs have a significant impact on regional development because they generate high-tech entrepreneurship and can be a source of technological spill-overs for established firms. This is specific relevant for those regions that need to change their industrial structure from low to high-tech sectors.

The phenomenon of academic entrepreneurship raises several research and policy questions:

• how to promote entrepreneurial attitudes in students (entrepreneurship education);
• how to support new companies start-up (incubation);
• How to sustain the transfer from academic research to commercialization (technology transfer);
• how to foster the capacity of acquire adequate human and financial resources (spin-offs growth);
• how to improve the interactions between research institutions, new firms and local government (Triple Helix).

The main aim of this workshop is to discuss these questions by comparing experiences in different European countries and collect recent theoretical and empirical studies on these topics.