Abstract
The notion of the entrepreneurial university has received considerable attention from the academic community and policymakers. This research book, co-edited by Lene Foss and David V. Gibson, which consists of 12 chapters from leading academics, joins this timely intellectual conversation and policy debate by discussing various cases of entrepreneurial universities. This book offers an interesting perspective perceiving the entrepreneurial university as a change agent based on rich case studies across northern Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Chapter 1 put forward a theoretical framework by juxtaposing the notion of ‘entrepreneurial architecture’ with Scott’s three institutional pillars (regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive). Entrepreneurial architecture is defined as the collection of internal factors that interact to shape entrepreneurial agendas at the universities, consisting of five dimensions, namely, structures, systems, leadership, strategies, and culture (Vorley and Nelles, 2008). Furthermore, Chapter 1 introduced two research questions: (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?
From Chapters 2 to 11 different case studies were presented to illustrate the narrative stories of building the entrepreneurial university. The methodology choice of narrative analysis and stories in this book proves to be an appropriate research method to unpack the complexity and nuances in organization and management studies (Liu et al., 2012). Chapter 2 provided an overview of New York University’s entrepreneurial endeavors in building innovative activities through the collaboration among business, government, and academic communities. Chapter 3 revealed that Austin Technopolis enabled the University of Texas to engage with business and government, so as to foster regional entrepreneurship and innovation activities. By shifting the context from the United States to Europe, Chapter 4 focused on the successful case of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. It illustrated how the University of Cambridge became a leading center in nurturing technology entrepreneurship from a historical perspective. By contrast, Chapter 5 described a modern British university, Kingston University, by focusing on its entrepreneurial education portfolios. These four chapters collectively illustrated the Anglo-Saxon context, where universities charge high student fees. Such an approach can provide financial strength, with an emphasis on student satisfaction, as highlighted in the UK National Student Satisfaction Survey (Gibbons et al., 2015).
Contrary to the Anglo-Saxon model, universities in Nordic countries, without charging any student fees, may be significantly affected by government policy. The recent labor market redundancy in some Nordic country universities reflects the influence of budget constraints (Grove, 2016). Hence, government policy can have an important bearing on a university’s approach in the pursuit of becoming an entrepreneurial university. Chapter 6 introduced the case of Chalmers elucidating the role played by industry in shaping the entrepreneurial architecture of a Swedish university. Chapter 7 explained the evolution of Lund University’s entrepreneurial ecosystem based on a longitudinal perspective. Chapter 8 concentrated on Finland, using the case of Aalto University and how the recent mergers of different Finnish universities influenced the activities in building the university’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. By comparison, Chapter 9 depicted Kymenlaakso University of Applied Sciences, a small regional university in Finland, articulating the responses to policy changes and economic pressure on the way of building an entrepreneurial university. Chapter 10 highlighted Norway, narrating the historical roots and development trajectory of Arctic University of Norway (UiT) and the recent entrepreneurship program initiatives introduced to try to create an entrepreneurial university. Chapter 11 focused on a new university, Stavanger’s story, from a regional college based on petroleum industry’s need to emphasize entrepreneurship for regional development. Collectively, these five chapters painted a diverse picture of the attempt of northern European universities to act entrepreneurially. The analysis in Chapter 12 based on the cases from Sweden, Finland, Norway, the United States, and the United Kingdom offers a contextualized understanding of the entrepreneurial university and its institutional contexts. To sum up, institutional context can both enable and constrain the development of an entrepreneurial university. In turn, the entrepreneurial university can also shape the institutional environment through entrepreneurial activities.
This book is a great achievement in addressing the multi-facets of building an entrepreneurial university. However, several areas deserve future scholarly investigation. First, the book only uses one metaphor of ‘entrepreneurial architecture’ as the main theoretical lens. Multiple theoretical perspectives may complement the understanding of the entrepreneurial university, such as the Triple Helix framework (Etzkowitz, 2010), as the role of university and academic entrepreneurship is changing (Siegel and Wright, 2015). How global talent mobility can contribute to developing the entrepreneurial university? (Wang and Liu, 2016). Second, nowadays higher education faces a global competition and international opportunities. How to capitalize the higher education market of emerging economies in the process of building an entrepreneurial university?
To summarize, we highly recommend this book to the students of entrepreneurship, small business, higher education, entrepreneurs, and policymakers who are interested in the research agenda and practice of building an entrepreneurial university. The detailed case analysis provides a comparative perspective to comprehend the entrepreneurial university in particular and the entrepreneurship ecosystem in some cases across diverse institutional contexts.