Entrepreneurial universities: exploring the academic and innovative dimensions of entrepreneurship in higher education.

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is an expression of the talent of human creation, and as such it manifests in different areas of individual life, the business world, society, and institutions: from different aspects of management thinking, as expressed by Schumpeter (1934, 1950), in reference to the skill for the discovery and exploitation of opportunities; Penrose (1959), when he refers to the executive’s mind as one of the essential resources of the company; or Baumol (1968) when he emphasizes the importance of creativity as an essential element, which combines different factors and achieves economic growth. Based on the individual consideration of entrepreneurship, the received education and the influence of society (Nga & Shamuganathan, 2010), or the existence of innate characteristics (Chell, 2008), they explain the features or characteristics of the entrepreneur which lead them to the discovery of opportunities (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000) or to create them by means of new combinations of factors (Schumpeter, 1934). In this sense, the field of entrepreneurship essentially corresponds to “the study of sources of opportunities; the processes of discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities; and the set of individuals who discover, evaluate, and exploit them” (Shane y Venkataraman, Ibid, 218); nothing can substitute ingenuity and individual intuition to discover new opportunities or create them by means of new factors or new combinations of factors. However without neglecting the importance of the characteristics and individual initiatives of the entrepreneur, this book investigates the institutional dimension of entrepreneurship to establish Entrepreneurial Universities as an object of study. This institutional dimension of concept (Clark, 1998), in turn, has two aspects: one which enhances the individual aspect of future entrepreneurs, since these universities establish learning methods for their students which facilitate a greater inclination for innovation and entrepreneurship; and the aspect which involves the direct entrepreneurial action of the university, which by means of professional advice to companies or business incubators, and the creation of spin-offs, inaugurates a major path so that universities—their different professors and departments—fully intervene in the discovery of opportunities or in their creation as well as technology transfer. In this framework, they also increase the resources and the incentives for research and their subsequent application to innovation (Ross, 1976).