Entrepreneurial process in humanities and social sciences: a different nature for academic spin-offs and startups?

The dissertation examines the entrepreneurial process in the soft sciences field. Since the main difference between hard and soft sciences is in the codification of knowledge, the understanding of why and how a soft science finding can be traded might open the doors to new kinds of entrepreneurship. After the global crisis of the last decade, many disequilibrium situations have arisen. In particular, in the Western World, it has involved the personal and societal spheres where iniquity and injustice conditions have spread. An increasing attention to ethical themes, joint with environmental problems, led to a diffusion of social entrepreneurship in all its facets. So, after framing cultural and educational entrepreneurship inside commercial and social entrepreneurial concepts, the dissertation shows the main frameworks developed by academics and scholars on these specific fields. Two cases of academic entrepreneurship in humanities and social sciences are presented to support these theoretical frameworks. By a side they emphasize the differences between academic startups and spin-offs, while on the other hand they provide cues for an examination of the commercialization of products developed starting from low-codified knowledge.