Making Academic Entrepreneurship Measurable: An Interpretive Framework for Comparative Indicators

Abstract

Comparative measurement has become a central feature of research and policy analysis in innovation and higher education, where indicators are widely used to assess performance, support benchmarking, and inform decision-making. Yet measuring complex and institutionally embedded phenomena such as academic entrepreneurship remains challenging. These difficulties extend beyond data availability to the conceptual and interpretive conditions that govern how heterogeneous and evolving practices are translated into cross-country indicators. Drawing on the sociology of quantification and the literature on innovation indicators, this paper examines how academic entrepreneurship is rendered measurable in comparative settings. It argues that measurement cannot be reduced to a purely technical exercise but rather involves a series of structured choices related to conceptual definition, proxy selection, institutional context, and data representation. Academic entrepreneurship spans a wide range of activities, from formal commercialisation, such as patents and spin-offs, to broader forms of engagement that are often only partially visible in conventional data sources. As a result, empirical representations are necessarily selective, capturing some dimensions of activity while others remain only partially captured or inferred. To address these challenges, the paper develops an interpretive framework that specifies the key analytical conditions that shape comparative measurement. These include boundary ambiguity, proxy-based observation, institutional variation, functional comparability, temporal alignment, causal interpretation, and communicative simplification. These conditions explain why formally comparable indicators do not always support equivalent interpretations across contexts, and how measurement choices shape the representation of academic entrepreneurship. This paper contributes a diagnostic framework that renders these conditions analytically explicit and provides a basis for a more transparent and reflexive use of indicators in cross-country analysis. Rather than proposing a new measurement instrument, it clarifies what comparative indicators can and cannot capture. The paper also outlines implications for research and policy, emphasising the importance of explicit definitions, theoretically grounded proxy selection, and context-sensitive interpretation. Reframing measurements as an interpretive analytical practice contributes to a more differentiated understanding of comparative evidence in innovation and higher education research.