The Entrepreneurial University

Context and Institutional Change

Lene Foss, David Gibson, David v. Gibson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138743540
• eBook ISBN: 9781317568933
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

Global recessions and structural economic shifts are motivating government and business leaders worldwide to increasingly look to "their" universities to stimulate regional development and to contribute to national competiveness. The challenge is clear and the question is pressing: How will universities respond?

This book presents in-depth case narratives of ten universities from Norway, Finland, Sweden, UK, and the U.S. that have overcome significant challenges to develop programs and activities to commercialize scientific research, launch entrepreneurial degree programs, establish industry partnerships, and build entrepreneurial cultures and ecosystems. The universities are quite diverse: large and small; teaching and research focused; internationally recognized and relatively new; located in major cities and in emerging regions. Each case narrative describes challenges overcome, actions taken, and resulting accomplishments.

This volume will be of interest to policymakers and university administrators as well as researchers and students interested in how different programs and activities can promote university entrepreneurship while contributing to economic growth in developed and developing economies.

1 The entrepreneurial university Context and institutional change

Lene Foss and David V. Gibson

DOI: 10.4324/9781315737065-1

Introduction

In the current globally competitive business environment, nations and regions are pressuring their universities to stimulate job and wealth creation. In addition to the key objectives of excelling in education and research, universities worldwide are increasingly tasked with fulfilling and enhancing the third mission of “service” with a concerted effort to help stimulate and sustain economic development. With this increased emphasis on commercializing research, licensing of technology, creating university spin-offs, introducing entrepreneurship programmes, and expanding university–industry relations, universities are being encouraged to take an entrepreneurial turn. We introduce this term to identify the transition that challenges universities as institutions, beyond their first mission (education) and second mission (research). Theoretically the entrepreneurial turn can be viewed as an institutional change (Scott, 2014) consisting of the roles, norms, and conventions that society has identified for how universities are expected to perform. We view the entrepreneurial turn as being heavily influenced by the institutional environment in which the university is embedded. Scott (2014: Chapters 1 and 2) devotes many pages to characterizing or defining institutions by drawing on, for example, Spencer (1876, 1896, 1910); Durkheim (1893/1949); Parsons (1934/1990), and Powell and DiMaggio (1991). In the end Scott (2014: 56) suggests using the omnibus conception that institutions comprise regulative, normative, and culture-cognitive elements that, together with associated activities and resources, provide stability and meaning to social life. Also well suited to our purposes, Storper (2013: 8, 9) considers institutions as being made up of rules, laws, and formal policies as well as the organization of key groups or communities from elite networks to civic associations and neighbourhood groups. In this regard, we are interested in how national and regional institutions interact to shape policies and attitudes and actions toward the entrepreneurial turn within and external to the university.

The term “entrepreneurial university” can be traced back to the highly cited book Academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997) that examines the changes of academic labour between 1970 and 1995, while identifying the term “academic capitalism” with the market effort to secure universities external finance. In a study of the transformation of five European universities, Clark (1998: 3–4) uses the term “entrepreneurial university” to mean a

characteristic of social systems; that is, of entire universities and their internal departments, research centres, faculties and schools. The concept carries the overtone of “enterprise” – a wilful effort in institution-building that requires much special activity and energy. Taking risks when initiating new practices whose outcome is in doubt is a major factor. An entrepreneurial university, on its own, actively seeks to shift in organizational character so as to arrive at a more promising posture for the future. Entrepreneurial universities seek to become “stand-up” universities that are significant actors on their own terms. Institutional entrepreneurship can be seen as both process and outcome. ¹

According to recent literature, universities can be entrepreneurial in two main ways. First, academic entrepreneurship focuses on the commercialization of knowledge and research findings (Klofsten and Jones-Evans, 2000; Roessner et al., 2013). In this way universities relate the third mission to research by becoming knowledge hubs (Youtie and Shapira, 2008) and are often concerned with the challenges and opportunities associated with technology transfer (Mowery et al., 2002; Owen-Smith and Powell, 2003). Second, entrepreneurial education (Gibb and Hannon, 2006) links the third mission to the university’s teaching mission and the building of entrepreneurial competency (Altmann and Ebersberger, 2013). In recognizing these two specific ways in which universities can develop entrepreneurially, this volume follows Clark’s (1998) definition by viewing universities as institutional entrepreneurs when seeking to accommodate the entrepreneurial turn as a societal norm.

It is clear that governments, businesses, and societies differ in how they expect universities to contribute to knowledge-based growth, just as societal and institutional contexts differ in how they enhance or impede third-mission programmes and activities. ² Despite an increasing number of edited books on university entrepreneurship (Morris et al., 2013; Hoskinson and Kuratko, 2014; Fayolle and Redford, 2014; McKelvey and Holmén, 2009; Fetters et al., 2010), scant attention has been given to the role of context in the emergence and development of entrepreneurial universities as institutions. Given the political and market context of universities worldwide, there is a clear need for a theoretical lens that addresses this multilevel phenomenon in a diverse range of environmental settings. We believe such theory should emphasize that organizations are both creatures of their institutional environments and active players in these processes (Scott, 2014). Thus the emerging entrepreneurial university is a result of complex recursive processes by which institutional forces both shape, and are shaped by, organizational actions. Accordingly, this volume focuses on the interrelationship between the university and its context through the lens of institutional theory as we seek to contribute theoretically, empirically, and methodologically to the area of university entrepreneurship.

Theoretical framework and research questions

This volume follows the call by Tolbert et al. (2011) that the mutual neglect of entrepreneurship research and institutional theory has limited the development of both traditions. We therefore aim to to integrate the entrepreneurial architecture concept at an organizational level in a larger institutional framework (Nelles and Vorley, 2010a, 2011; Vorley and Nelles, 2008). Theoretically, we employ a dual-level framework, focusing at both organizational and institutional levels of analysis, while exploring the entrepreneurial turn of universities embedded in different national and regional environments, meeting the need to also contextualize entrepreneurship theory (cf. Steyaert and Katz, 2004; Zahra, 2007; Welter, 2011). The two main research questions we address are: (1) What actors and forces are important in motivating institutional change in the development of a university’s entrepreneurial architecture? (2) How do universities interact with institutional context in developing entrepreneurially? We aim to provide (1) new knowledge on actors and forces that motivate change in universities’ entrepreneurial architecture, and (2) comparative examples of universities as they affect and are affected by institutional contexts in their entrepreneurial development.

Empirically, we sample universities from different national and regional contexts to develop in-depth comparative studies of emerging and well-developed entrepreneurial universities across institutional contexts. American universities have long been influenced by the Bayh–Dole Act of 1980, which accelerated the diffusion of new technology from universities and federal laboratories to firms (Lockett et al., 2005). The United Kingdom was influenced in the mid-1980s by British business leaders collaborating with the Thatcher government to build an enterprise culture in tertiary education (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997). Legislation was enacted through three key programmes: the University Challenge, the Science Enterprise Challenge, and the Higher Education Innovation Fund, which stimulated the commercialization of university-based research, innovation in small firms, and the development of public–private partnerships (Lockett et al., 2005). We selected two universities from the United States and two from the United Kingdom, as cases to better understand the perspective of these early adopters of third-mission activities and programmes. We have further selected universities from the northern European countries of Finland, Sweden, and Norway as these universities have been embedded in different political and market contexts compared to the United States and the United Kingdom. In Finland, universities and the government have addressed the increased pressure to transform its higher education system by emphasizing greater institutional autonomy, and multidisciplinary teaching and research (Kyrö and Mattila, 2012; Ministry of Education Finland, 2007). Sweden has preserved the law of the university teacher’s exemption, which allows researchers (as opposed to universities) to retain full rights to their discoveries (Wigren-Kristoferson et al., 2011). Norwegian universities have only recently become formally involved in spin-off formation. Intellectual property ownership was previously assigned to the individual scholar, but transferred to universities as recently as 2003 (Rasmussen et al., 2014). The universities vary from small to large, old to new, with varying histories of research contributions. Furthermore, some are embedded in rather small regions that may be either developed or developing, while others are in large and established cities.

Methodologically, this volume seeks to fill a third gap inasmuch as research on university entrepreneurship has been dominated by macro analysis and the use of indicators and surveys. We employ a narrative case study methodology to portray the intricate interrelationships between the university and its surrounding institutional environment – and allow the reader access to a complexity in models and a richness in data of interdepend...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 The entrepreneurial university: context and institutional change
• 2 New York University: nurturing entrepreneurship in New York City
• 3 Creating and sustaining high-technology development in Austin, Texas
• 4 High-technology entrepreneurship in a university city: the Cambridge story
• 5 Kingston University London: using entrepreneurship programmes to attract talent and to enhance educational impact
• 6 Chalmers: an entrepreneurial university institutionalizing the entrepreneurial?
• 7 The evolution of Lund University’s entrepreneurial ecosystem from 1980 to 2012
• 8 Entrepreneurial Aalto: where science and art meet technology and business
• 9 Kymenlaakso University of Applied Sciences, Finland: in search of university-wide entrepreneurial action
• 10 UiT The Arctic University of Norway: challenges at the Arctic crossroads
• 11 Stavanger: from petroleum focus to diversified competence through crisis and consensus
• 12 The entrepreneurial university: case analysis and implications
• Index