Crowding in or crowding out: the link between academic entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial traits Cornelia Kolb • Marcus Wagner Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Abstract The entrepreneurship literature has identified several entrepreneurial traits as being important to become a successful entrepreneur. Using the Five Factor personality model we analyze differences between two types of entrepreneurs: Individuals founding an enterprise out of university employment and graduates who are not employed at the uni- versity before starting a company. To analyze potential differences in personality between these two groups we use a unique data set of former students from a large German university. We show that entrepreneurs out of the university context possess lower levels of openness to experience as well as higher levels of agreeableness. Also, we provide evi- dence for the importance of the predominant type of knowledge upon which academic ventures are built. The findings confirm that entrepreneurs out of the university context overly focus on the scientific aspects of their start-up idea and thus may pursue it in a potentially suboptimal manner, but that this can be mitigated by dedicated support mea- sures and structures within the university, for which we also provide specific examples. Keywords Academic entrepreneurship Á Personality traits Á Five Factor model Á Technology transfer Á Knowledge transfer JEL Classification L26 Á O31 Á J23 C. Kolb Á M. Wagner Chair in Entrepreneurship and Management, Department of Business Administration and Economics, University of Wuerzburg, Stephanstr. 1, 97070 Wuerzburg, Germany C. Kolb (&) Service Center for Research and Technology Transfer, University of Wuerzburg, Sanderring 2, 97070 Wuerzburg, Germany e-mail: c.kolb@uni-wuerzburg.de M. Wagner Bureau d’Economie The´orique et Applique´e, Universite´ de Strasbourg, 61 Avenue de la Foˆret Noire, 67000 Strasbourg, France 123 J Technol Transf DOI 10.1007/s10961-014-9346-y