Bence Matyas,Victoria Izquieta,Paula Salazar,Jhony Villacis,Maria Ordonez,Paola Carrera,Belen Soriano,Isabel Carpio,Juan Pablo Salgado
Entrepreneurial activities cannot be rigorously controlled but measuring their efficiency is essential for improvements in decision-making. There are several ways to measure broad range of entrepreneurial activity on national and international level but to measure efficiency of smaller ecosystems such as academic startup mentor programs is still a challenge. We applied The new Kauffman Index that was generally designed for measure entrepreneurial activity on national level to measure startup activities in a university framework. We determined amending factors in order to the RNE, SD and sSA values could be interpreted in a smaller ecosystem too. The present study evaluates 48 academic startups that were registered for the period late 2017- early 2018 in Coworking StartUPS startup mentor project at Universidad Politécnica Salesiana, Ecuador. We were looking for the answer to how many of them have become viable companies in one year. 45,83% of the academic startups have ongoing revenue, being considered as viable startups in this study. The average revenue of the viable startups is 1127 USD per month that is 2,86 times greater than the minimum salary in Ecuador and is 1,87 times greater than the average salary of the capital. Our results seem promising considering that in our study only the viable startups were interpreted as companies for determining RNE and SD, and the total number of graduate students was interpreted as population. Universities are expected to prepare their students for the life after-graduation. Considering the high amount of viable startups having different business areas that are being mentored in the Coworking StartUPS project, it can be concluded that the Universidad Politécnica Salesiana makes great efforts to promote and teach entrepreneurship to its students regardless of the field of expertise.