International Journal of Business and Management; Vol. 15, No. 8; 2020 ISSN 1833-3850 E-ISSN 1833-8119 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education 39 Academic Entrepreneurial Intention and Its Determinants: Exploring the Moderating Role of Innovation Ecosystem Massimiliano Vesci 1 , Antonio Botti 1 , Rosangela Feola 1 & Chiara Crudele 1 1 Department of Management & Innovation Systems, University of Salerno, Italy Correspondence: Antonio Botti, Department of Management & Innovation Systems, University of Salerno, Italy. E-mail: abotti@unisa.it Received: May 12, 2020 Accepted: June 14, 2020 Online Published: July 2, 2020 doi:10.5539/ijbm.v15n8p39 URL: https://doi.org/10.5539/ijbm.v15n8p39 Abstract The paper aims to study factors that affect entrepreneurial intention among academicians (Prodan & Drnovsek 2010). We develop a framework in which the classical intention determinants derived from the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB, Ajzen, 1991) interact with some elements of the environmental innovation ecosystem as identified in the Triple Helix Model (THM, Etzkovitz et al., 2007), namely financial/industrial, university and government supports. We contend that when individuals perceive high support from all these factors, the predictive power of entrepreneurial attitude, perceived behavioral control and social norms in shaping academic entrepreneurial intention generally increases. This study theoretically advances research on academic entrepreneurial intention, highlighting the interplay between individual cognitions and environmental cues and proposes some insights for practice and national policy makers. Keywords: academic entrepreneurial intention, theory of planned behavior, innovation ecosystem, triple Helix model 1. Introduction Academic Entrepreneurial Intention (AEI), that is the intention of an academic person to promote a new company based on the outcomes of scientific research (Clarysse, Heirman, & Degroof, 2000), in the last years, has granted interest from an increasing number of entrepreneurship researchers (Prodan & Drnovsek 2010; Goethner, Obschonka, Silbereisen, & Cantner, 2012; Ozgul, & Kunday 2015; Mosey, Noke, & Binks, 2012). As career choice processes are cognitive in nature, when individuals decide to enroll in an entrepreneurship career, they lay in a process in which thoughts, mentality, behavior and intentional elements are central (Krueger, Reilly &, Carsrud, 2000). As such, following social cognition stream of literature, behavioral intentions (Wilson, Kickul, & Marlino, 2007; Lanero, Vázquez, Gutiérrez & García, 2015; Peterman & Kennedy 2003) are considered strong predictors of consequent entrepreneurial behavior that lead to the aforementioned deliberate career choice. Starting from the intentionality characteristic of the entrepreneurial process (Krueger et al., 2000; Kolvereid, 2016), studies on AEI have generally adopted the TPB (Ajzen, 1991) to study elements that influence entrepreneurial intention in academic context (Goethner et al. 2012; Obschonka et al. 2012, 2015). The studies published in recent years identify different antecedents of AEI and generally focus on both perceptual and psychological factors at individual level (Prodan, & Drnovsek 2010; Huyghe, & Knockaert 2015; Goethner et al. 2012; Obschonka et al. 2012; 2015; Feola, Vesci, Botti, & Parente, 2017). In the meantime, external context and exogenous factors have been considered and analyzed with specific reference to AEI (see for example: Moog, Werner, Houweling, & Backes-Gellner, 2015; Foo, Knockaert, Chan, & Erikson, 2016; Guerrero & Urbano, 2014). However, the review of the literature highlights that AEI research focuses on the separate analysis of psychological and contextual determinants, neglecting to deeply analyze the interacting effects among the endogenous (psychological) and exogenous (contextual) level from a cognitive perspective. In this specific context, many authors (Cooke & Sheran, 2004; Carsrud & Brännback, 2011; Moriano, Gorgievski, Laguna, Stephan, & Zarafshani, 2012; Shook, Priem, & McGee, 2003; Liñán, Urbano & Guerrero, 2011) hint to study the moderating effects of contextual factors and environment in order to better explain the direct effects of psychological determinants. As stated by some studies (Kibler, 2013; Schlaegel & Koenig, 2013) the inclusion of external moderators’ factors could increase the explanatory power of intentional models.