Competition-based policy programmes are an external steering mechanism to create beneficial outcomes for societies that are entering the Continental European Higher Education landscape. The Excellence Initiative in Germany aimed to enhance research quality, international visibility and support peak performing universities. We want to study if there was a side effect of the Initiative on academic entrepreneurial activity and if so, whether or not it was a system-wide and/or a winners effect. We measure entrepreneurial activity by the patenting activity and industry collaboration of a university. The analysis is based on 73 German universities observed from 2004 to 2011. Employing a difference-in-differences estimation, we find that the Initiative created an advantage for the whole of Germany while being an Excellence University does not have an impact on academic entrepreneurship with regards to patenting activity. However, we find a Matthew effect concerning rewards in industry collaboration. We conclude that the Initiative had positive side effects for the system and partly also for the winners of the competition.