Creating entrepreneurial networks: Commercialisation of research, mobility and collaboration during PhD education Dzamila Bienkowska 1 and Magnus Klofsten 2 1 Dzamila.Bienkowska@liu.se 2 Magnus.Klofsten@liu.se All at the Department of Management and Engineering and HELIX Excellence Centre, Linköping University, SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden The universities are expected to contribute to the society in manifold ways; their main tasks include supplying the labour market with educated workers, developing scientific knowledge, both basic and applied, and recently also supporting entrepreneurial initiatives and commercialisation of research results. PhD education constitutes a considerable part of many universities’ activities and PhD students perform a large share of research. Yet there are few studies concerned with PhD students’ possibilities to commercialise research results or the university context supportiveness in this regard. Therefore, this paper investigates PhD students’ views on commercialisation and perceived grade of support from various levels of the university hierarchy. Moreover, the extent of mobility and external collaborations during PhD education and their correlations with opinions of PhD students are studied. These aspects are studied through analysis of data from a survey of 465 PhD students at Linköping University, Sweden. The results show that PhD students are on average slightly positive towards commercialisation of research results, although there are differences between various faculties. The university context is perceived as slightly supportive, except for the department and division levels at the faculties of Arts & Sciences (incl. Educational Sciences) and Health Sciences. A majority of PhD students are involved in external collaborations as a part of their PhD education, while a quarter have been spending a part of their PhD studies at another organisation. PhD students’ views on commercialisation are more connected to the direction of mobility than to mobility per se, while for external collaboration interest in commercialisation is lowest amongst those not involved in collaboration at all. 1. Introduction Since the concept of the entrepreneurial university was introduced in the beginning of the 1990s, the manner in which the higher educational institutions, e.g. through commercialisation of research results, can contribute to wealth and economic growth has been frequently debated (Cowen, 1991; Clark, 1998; Gibb and Hannon, 2006). Studies by Saxenian (1994) and Etzkowitz and Klofsten (2005) show that presence of a university over a long period of time can have a positive effect on knowledge- based regional development. Therefore it is not surprising that we over the years have witnessed a large number of initiatives aimed to promote a wide range of entrepreneurial activities leading to formation of new organisations (cf. Gartner, 1988) inside as well as outside the university environment (Bergek and Norrman, 2008). It is well known that the university environment consists of many different groups of individuals that could act entrepreneurially. A key challenge is to reach those individuals and facilitate that they get access to relevant and necessary resources (Gibb, 2005). One of most critical resources is the presence of various types of networks. Most economic behaviour is influenced by networks of social relations, including starting new ventures, change of career paths of individuals or exchange of information and tangible resources between actors (Granovetter 1974, 1985). Entrepreneurial