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This study aims to ascertain the personal characteristics of a group of successful academic entrepreneurs in a South African university enterprise and the prevalent barriers and enablers to their entrepreneurial endeavour.

The authors used a Delphi process to identify and rank the characteristics, enablers, barriers and behaviours of entrepreneurial academics, with a Nominal Group Technique applied to establish challenges they encounter managing their enterprise and to propose solutions.

Perseverance, resilience and innovation are critical personal characteristics, while collaborative networks, efficient research infrastructure and established research competence are essential for success. The university’s support for entrepreneurship is a significant enabler, with unnecessary bureaucracy and poor access to project and general enterprise funding an impediment. Successful academic entrepreneurs have strong leadership, and effective management and communication skills.

The main limitation is the small study participant group drawn from a single university enterprise, which complicates generalisability. The study supported the use of Krueger’s (2009) entrepreneurial intentions model for low- and middle-income country (LMIC) academic entrepreneur investigation but proposed the inclusion of mitigators to entrepreneurial activation to recognise contextual deficiencies and challenges.

Skills-deficient LMIC universities should extensively and directly support their entrepreneurial academics to overcome their contextual deficiencies and challenging environment.

This study contributes to addressing the paucity of academic entrepreneur research in LMIC contexts by identifying LMIC-specific factors that inhibit the entrepreneur’s movement from entrepreneurial intention to entrepreneurial action.

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The need for a top management transition is a situation that eventually faces all ongoing organisations. While some replacements require quick and decisive actions necessitated by the death or serious illness of the chief executive officer (CEO), a major corporate blunder, or some other catastophic event, the more typical scenario involves a longer transition period. The former mode of transition (catastrophic event) has generally been considered a “revolutionary” change, while the latter has been classified as an “evolutionary” event (Bigelow, 1981). Yet, the differences between these two extremes appears to be based far more on the duration of the change, perhaps intensity as well, and not on the general process of change involved.

In recent years the divide between areas of law, which have hitherto been perceived, in most systems of jurisprudence, as relatively and mutually distinct, has narrowed and in some instances all but disappeared. This tendency is perhaps no more dramatically illustrated than in, which for a better description, might be termed the area of financial regulation. When the present author started teaching a course in the University of Cambridge on financial services regulation in 1979, the perception among those of his colleagues who regarded such things, was that this formed part of the corpus of corporate law. Of course, this analysis is only partly justified, and beyond the area of corporate finance law is misconceived. On the other hand, the commercial lawyers, who — at least in Cambridge, have been regarded or perhaps more accurately tolerated, as being a little more academically respectable than pure corporate lawyers, were distinctly unsympathetic to the notion that financial services law is in part akin to banking law and therefore a subject more suited to mercantile law. Given the author's predilection to weigh more heavily those aspects of the law that are protective of society, rather than facilitative of enterprise, it is not surprising that he ventured more and more into the realm of prohibitions, sanctions and even the criminal law. Take for example, the abuse of price sensitive information obtained by those in a confidential position, by virtue of that privileged relationship, to trade on the basis of that information in corporate securities — in other words, insider dealing. Is this properly regarded as a matter for the traditional law relating to directors and officers, and thus, company law, or given the fact that most countries today seek to curb such activity on the basis that it harms confidence in the integrity of public markets, a matter of public, and in particular criminal law? While such a debate may appear somewhat academic, even if it does result in the demarcation of courses and the like, it can and occasionally does have a very real practical significance. For example, in some jurisdictions, such as the USA, the Federal Legislature is competent to legislate on matters pertaining to international trade and finance, and thus the protection of the markets, but not matters of traditional company law. On the other hand, it has been contended in jurisdictions such as Canada that given the uncertainty attaching to the Federal Legislature's competence in regard to the financial markets, it is better to consider insider abuse as a matter of company law. Similar issues arise in the context of the competence of specific organs of the European Union and, of course, are not uncommon in the demarcation of competence between domestic agencies, whether of law reform or enforcement.