This paper reviews the Academic Entrepreneurship literature according to the emergence of powerful Digital technologies, providing an overview of the state of research and outlining a future research agenda about Digital Academic Entrepreneurship. One hundred and sixty-five journal papers were initially extracted from Scopus and their content was analysed for the paper selection process by two researchers in parallel, plus a third one in case of uncertainty. Finally, fifty-nine papers dealing with digital academic entrepreneurship and published in a variety of academic journals have been analyzed through a content and a bibliometric analysis. Findings show that literature on Digital Academic Entrepreneurship is really scant and dominated by unrelated research. Content analysis provides the emergence of four major research streams: 1) Digital Technologies for Entrepreneurship Education; 2) The “maker space movement” for Academic Entrepreneurship; 3) Digital tech- nologies for discovering entrepreneurial opportunities; 4) Creating entrepreneurial competences in the Digital “University-based” Entrepreneurial ecosystems. The paper presents the first attempt to provide a comprehensive structured literature review of the disruptive role of digital transformation for the Academic Entrepreneurship. Despite the growing literature on Digital Entrepreneurship, this research area is still fragmented and under- theorized. More systematic and holistic studies, considering both the technological, economic and the social aspects of Academic Entrepreneurship are required.
Keywords: Academic entrepreneurship | Bibliometric analysis | Digital technologies | Digital academic entrepreneurship | Digital transformation | Literature review | Software R | VOSviewer

Todays digital technologies, such as social media, business analytics, the Internet of Things, big data, advanced manufacturing, 3D printing, cloud and cyber-solutions and MOOCs, permeate every private and public organization. However, even if this phenomenon has been analyzed for entrepreneurship in general, to the best of our knowledge, the impact of digital technologies on academic entrepreneurship remains not only slightly addressed. With the aim of filling this gap, this paper proposes a novel contribution regarding the emerging concept of Digital Academic Entrepreneurship. Based on a qualitative literature review, an interpretative framework for Digital Academic Entrepreneurship is deductively proposed that is composed of the following components: the rationale for the adoption of digital technologies for academic entrepreneurship (why), the emerging forms of digital academic entrepreneurship (what), the stakeholders involved through the digital technologies to achieve the academic entrepreneurship goal (who), and the processes of academic entrepreneurship supported by digital technologies (how). The discussion section provides a conceptualization of Digital Academic Entrepreneurship. The paper closes with the identification of a research agenda for this promising and under-researched field.
Keywords: Academic entrepreneurship | Digital academic entrepreneurship | Digital technologies | Entrepreneurial university