64 Int. J. Technology and Globalisation, Vol. 1, No.

1, 2004

The evolution of the entrepreneurial university

Henry Etzkowitz
Purchase College, 735 Anderson Hill Road,
Purchase, New York 10577, USA
E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: A second academic revolution, integrating a mission for economic

and social development is transforming the traditional teaching and research
university into an entrepreneurial university. The Triple Helix thesis postulates
that the interaction among university-industry-government is the key to
improving the conditions for innovation in a knowledge-based society. More
than the development of new products in firms, innovation is the creation of
new arrangements among the institutional spheres that foster the conditions for
innovation. Invention of organisational innovations, new social arrangements
and new channels for interaction becomes as important as the creation of
physical devices in speeding the pace of innovation. This paper draws for data
on interviews conducted by the author in the USA, Sweden, Brazil, Italy,
Portugal and Denmark.

Keywords: triple helix; second academic revolution; research group;

quasi-firm.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Etzkowitz, H. (2004)

‘The evolution of the entrepreneurial university’, Int. J. Technology and
Globalisation, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp.64–77.

Biographical notes: Dr. Henry Etzkowitz is Associate Professor of Sociology

at Purchase College, Director of the Science Policy Institute at the State
University of New York and founding chair of the Inter-University Seminar on
Innovation, New York City. He is coauthor of Athena Unbound: the
Advancement of Women in Science and Technology, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2000; Public Venture Capital: Sources of Government
Funding for Technology Entrepreneurs, Harcourt, New York, 2001. His most
recent book is MIT and the Rise of Entrepreneurial Science, Routledge,
London, 2002. Etzkowitz is cofounder of the ‘Triple Helix’ International
Conference Series on University-Industry-Government Relations, Amsterdam,
1996; New York, 1998; Rio de Janeiro, 2000; Copenhagen/Lund 2002. He was
Visiting Professor at the Research Policy Institute, Lund University, summer
2003.

1 Introduction

The university and other knowledge producing institutions are viewed as a generator of
future economic growth in ever more direct ways. An entrepreneurial university might
seem to be an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, and an antithesis of the ivory tower,
academic model. We usually think of an entrepreneur as an individual who takes great
risks to initiate a new activity whilst organisations typically perform the function of
institutionalising and perpetuating an activity. However, organisations may also play the

Copyright © 2004 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

 The evolution of the entrepreneurial university 65

entrepreneurial role, as Schumpeter noted in his analysis of the role of the Department of
Agriculture in creating the US agricultural research system [1]. Academic
entrepreneurship is, on the one hand, an extension of teaching and research activities and,
on the other hand, the internalisation of technology transfer capabilities, taking a role
traditionally played by industry. It is this ‘capitalisation of knowledge’ that is the heart of
a new mission for the university, linking universities more tightly to users of knowledge
and establishing the university as an economic actor in its own right.
The entrepreneurial university is an emergent phenomenon that is a result of the
working out of an ‘inner logic’ of academic development that previously expanded the
academic enterprise from a conservator to an originator of knowledge. Originating as a
medieval institution for the conservation and transmission of knowledge, the university
has evolved over the centuries into an institution in which knowledge is also created and
put into use. Research became an inextricable part of the teaching process as teaching
extended from dissemination of available knowledge to include methodologies that
retrieve lost knowledge. Research was expanded to an increasing number of disciplines
as reliable methods were formulated, enabling students to participate in the creation of
new knowledge as part of their training. Naturally, what was found was reinterpreted in
the light of current interests as part of the recuperation of classic texts. Practical
implications were discerned in some of these research results, especially in the sciences,
and steps were taken to put them to use.
The entrepreneurial university is an efflorescence of embryonic characteristics that
exist potentially in any academic enterprise. Theories of the university typically fail to
account for the metamorphosis of a medieval institution based on charitable and
eleemosynary principles into one capable of generating a significant part of its own
support and of playing a primary, rather than a secondary, role in society. Instead, they
argue for confinement to whatever has previously been accepted as academic roles and
statuses, such as teaching and research, isolation, or a close connection to the state. The
entrepreneurial university transcends and incorporates previous academic dichotomies
(ivory-tower/polytechnic; research/teaching) in a new synthesis. This paper analyses the
emergence of the university as an entrepreneur, the internal and external impetuses for
this transformation, and its consequences for the role of the university in the societal
transition from an industrial to a knowledge base.

2 The norms of the entrepreneurial university

The entrepreneurial university model can be expressed in a set of inter-related

propositions: Capitalisation, Interdependence, Independence, Hybridisation and
Reflexivity (CIIHR). The five norms and counter-norms of academic entrepreneurship
live in a creative tension that is highly conducive to innovation. The optimum academic
format resides in a balance among these elements. These principles have been derived
from the analysis of entrepreneurial academic development in the USA, Europe and Latin
America and may be utilised as guidelines for institutional renovation.
66 H. Etzkowitz

Proposition 1: capitalisation
Knowledge is created and transmitted for use as well as for disciplinary advance; the
capitalisation of knowledge becomes the basis for economic and social development and,
thus, of an enhanced role for the university in society.

Proposition 2: interdependence
The entrepreneurial university interacts closely with the industry and government; it is
not an ivory tower university isolated from society.

Proposition 3: independence
The entrepreneurial university is a relatively independent institution; it is not a dependent
creature of another institutional sphere.

Proposition 4: hybridisation
The resolution of the tensions between the principles of interdependence and
independence are an impetus to the creation of hybrid organisational formats to realise
both objectives simultaneously.

Proposition 5: reflexivity
There is a continuing renovation of the internal structure of the university as its relation
to industry and government changes, and of industry and government as their relationship
to the university is revised.
There are three stages and phases to the development of the university as an
entrepreneur, with each modality building upon the other in a usual, but by no means
necessary, order. In an initial phase (University Entrepreneur One), the academic
institution takes a strategic view of its direction and gains some ability to set its own
priorities, typically through negotiations with resource providers [2]. In a second phase
(University Entrepreneur Two), the academic institution takes an active role in
commercialising the intellectual property arising from the activities of its faculty, staff
and students. In a third phase (University Entrepreneur Three), the academic institution
takes a proactive role in improving the efficacy of its regional innovation environment,
often in collaboration with industry and government actors.
Although these phases were identified as taking place sequentially in the development
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), reverse sequences may be identified,
for example, as in the experience of the Blekinge Institute of Technology, which took off
from phase three [3]. Blekinge was founded as a crucial link in a regional renewal
scheme, as a platform for the creation of software firms in the immediate future, whereas
MIT was established as a distinctive academic format that would contribute to regional
innovation in the long term. Not surprisingly, the similarities in intention and purpose
between these mid 19th and late 20th century entrepreneurial academic foundations may
outweigh any differences.
 The evolution of the entrepreneurial university 67

3 MIT as an entrepreneurial academic exemplar

Formerly misinterpreted as an academic anomaly that would inevitably conform to the

research university model, MIT can now be seen as the exemplar of an entrepreneurial
university format that supersedes and incorporates previous academic models. MIT was
founded during the mid 19th century as a university with a strategic purpose, the renewal
of an early US high-tech conurbation. This academic project was based on the strategic
vision of its founder, William Barton Rogers, Professor of Geology at the University of
Virginia, who moved to Boston in order be located in a region that had a need for such an
enterprise. The industrial infrastructure of the Boston region, based upon textiles and
machines, had emerged in the early 19th century. Rogers obtained industry donations and
political support to gain a share of the Massachusetts land grant, a unique application of
the law supporting academic foundations with a practical intent, which, at the time,
typically focused on agriculture.
During the early 20th century, MIT’s involvement with industry was structured
through a series of organisational innovations that legitimated the interaction between the
academic and business spheres. This included the invention of the one-fifth rule
regulating consultation, the utilisation of contracts to formalise hitherto informal
university-industry ties, and the patent system to protect intellectual property. What
emerged were the traditional academic committee process to review inventions and an
external organisation, the Research Corporation, to market the patents to industry. The
next step was the creation of an organisation within the university, the technology
transfer office, to carry out this task on a more intensive basis. In either format, as a
branch of the university or as a freestanding entity, a search mechanism was introduced
to identify commercialisable knowledge within the university and to market it to potential
users.
During the 1930s, MIT played a leading role in developing a regional innovation
strategy based upon several instances of high tech firm-formation that had already
occurred by the 1920s. However, to generalise these instances and systematise the
capitalisation of knowledge, gaps had to be filled, such as providing business advice and
seed capital to professors who might have commercialisable technologies but lacked
other key elements that had heretofore been available only to relatively few academics.
This was the context in which a new organisational format, the venture capital firm, was
invented by academic, business and governmental leaders, out of elements drawn from
these institutional sources, in support of firm formation.
Firstly, bringing the representatives of the three institutional spheres together in the
New England Council provided an audience for Karl Compton, President of MIT, who,
together with fellow MIT administrators, had formulated the concept of firm formation
from academic research as an economic development strategy. This approach was based
on extending an available focus on ‘new products’ as a possible basis of economic
development, taking it one step further. The very process of including actors from these
various backgrounds in the strategy review and formulation process provided access to
the resources required to implement the eventual plan. By moving the ‘new product’
approach from the industrial sphere and tying it to the academic research process, the
MIT group, in effect, formulated a ‘linear model’ of innovation.
Secondly, in addition to providing a receptive venue for the concept of firm formation
from academia, the Council provided a venue for its specification as an organisational
strategy. Compton had previously, unsuccessfully, tried to introduce the general idea of
68 H. Etzkowitz

science-based economic development at the national political level. However, it did not
find a receptive audience due to prevailing views that too much new technology was
possibly the cause of depression and unemployment. New England, with its history of
industrial growth based on technological innovation, from at least the early 19th century
provided an exception to the general rule of technological scepticism that was the
prevailing ideology at the time.
Thirdly, the New England Council provided a network to put the concept into effect.
Several elements had to be brought together in order to invent the venture capital firm.
These included changes in the law, to allow financial institutions to invest part of
their capital in more risky ventures than previously allowed. Moreover, persons with
technical expertise were needed to seek out and review candidate technologies for
commercialisation, as well as individuals with business expertise to guide the
firm-formation process. Finally, someone with an overview of all the elements of the
process was required to knit these elements together into a coherent organisation.
The individual elements were available in the region. The
university-industry-government network created by the New England Council could call
upon individuals such as Ralph Flanders, who had moved from the industrial sphere, as
President of a Vermont tool company, to the political sphere, as Senator from Vermont,
with an intervening stint as a member of the board of the Boston branch of the Federal
Reserve Bank. Such persons were available to encourage the necessary legislation. MIT’s
senior faculty could be called upon as advisors to review candidate technologies and
recent graduates could be hired as technology scouts. The Harvard Business School
happened to have on its faculty a professor, Georges Doriot, who had taken an interest in
new firm formation in contrast to the vast majority of the faculty who were focused on
the issues facing existing, typically large, firms. Graduates, especially those who had
taken Doriot’s course in Manufacturing, could be recruited to work in an organisation
concerned with firm formation.
A university-industry-government network to promote regional development could be
built on a substratum of academic institutions such as MIT that were already producing
commercialisable technologies and that already had experience in transferring technology
to industry through consultation, patenting and licensing. In addition, a business school,
with a limited focus on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial skills, was available.
President Compton provided the necessary leadership to put these elements together into
a coherent organisational format. Operating within the context of the New England
Council, MIT took the Innovation Organiser (IO) role in renewing New England’s
regional innovation system [4].
There is a transformation in the mission of economic and social development, from
being merely a facilitator for transferring technology to individual firms to being a force
for fostering regional economic and social development. Instead of the focus being on an
individual patent or technology transfer regime, there is a concern with the university
playing a broader role in its region. Sometimes, as in Portugal, where regional political
entities are weak, the university plays a role of ‘regional innovation organiser’ (RIO),
bringing together local businesses and municipalities to develop an innovation
strategy [5].
 The evolution of the entrepreneurial university 69

4 Transcending the linear model

The entrepreneurial university encompasses and extends the research university,

enhancing it by joining a reverse linear dynamic to the classic linear model. The
entrepreneurial university takes a pro-active stance in putting knowledge to use and in
broadening the input into the creation of academic knowledge. Thus, it operates
according to an interactive rather than a linear model of innovation. The linear model,
starting from research and moving to utilisation, is complemented by a reverse linear
model, moving from problems in industry and society and seeking solutions in science.
Once the two processes operate in tandem, often through the university’s technology
transfer office, moving relevant knowledge and technology out of the university and its
liaison office and bringing problems in, an interactive process is generated in which each
linear starting point enhances the other. The university’s incubator facility, housing both
firms generated from academic research and firms brought into the university’s orbit by
entrepreneurs seeking a closer connection to the academic scene to enhance their firm,
exemplifies the interactive dynamic.
The classic linear model presumed a progression from research to development to
innovation and product introduction, in which the university was centrally involved only
in the first phase, transferring research results with commercial potential. The first step
towards an academic entrepreneurial ethos is increased sensitivity to results with practical
potential, followed by a willingness to participate in the realisation of this potential.
This change often occurs through the attention that outsiders pay to academic research for
this reason. Thus, in the early 20th century, after experiencing that visitors to campus
were utilising the practical implications of faculty research as their own, MIT
established a faculty committee to consider patenting discoveries made on campus
Interactions with persons such as venture capitalists and business angels have led other
academics to enter into projects to commercialise their research. The founding of
biotechnology firms such as Genentech and Synergen during the late 1970s and early
1980s exemplifies this collaborative process. Finally, academics themselves discern the
practical implications of their research, as in the classic closing sentence of the Watson
and Crick 1953 note in Nature announcing the double helix model: “It has not escaped
our attention…”
The next step to an entrepreneurial academic ethos is the realisation that working on
practical problems posed by non-academics can have a dual potential. On the one hand,
such work meets the needs of supporters of the academic enterprise and provides support
to that enterprise. On the other hand, these research tasks for others may lead to the
posing of new research questions with theoretical potential. The Materials
Characterisation Center at the University of Puerto Rico operates on the basis of this dual
focus, training its graduate students to pursue both tasks in tandem. An earlier generation
of basic researchers, such as Columbia University physicist Isidor Rabi, focused on
disciplinary advance, realised the theoretical potential of their practical work on World
War II weapons problems and, in the post war, revised their conception of science
accordingly.
70 H. Etzkowitz

The interactive model brings together the two linear models as well as generating an
interaction between them in which basic research questions arise from addressing
practical problems and vice versa. The potential of an interactive model became apparent
during the Second World War, when physicists working on engineering problems in
wartime research projects such as radar, who believed that they had put aside their
academic interests, started generating theoretical questions that they would address later.
Thus, scientists who had previously opposed federal funding of research, fearing that they
would lose their academic freedom, enthusiastically embraced it after the war.
A two-way flow of influence is created between the university and an increasingly
knowledge-based society as the distance among institutional spheres is reduced.
Universities negotiate partnerships with start-up firms, emanating from academic
research in which they invest intellectual and financial capital in exchange for equity in
these firms. They also make broad arrangements with R&D intensive firms for funds in
exchange for preferred access to patent rights and adjunct faculty status for company
researchers. Such firms may locate on campus, as at the University of Bochum in
Germany, the Centennial campus of North Carolina State University, and prospectively at
the College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley. The content
and formats for teaching, research and linkage itself are also affected. The assumption of
an active role in economic development leaves existing academic missions in place, but it
also encourages them to be carried out in new ways.

5 The relationship among the institutional spheres

To be an entrepreneur, a university has to have a considerable degree of independence

from the state and industry but also a high degree of interaction with these institutional
spheres. In academic systems following the Humboldtian model of close ties to the state
on the one hand, and professional autonomy guaranteed by civil service status on the
other, the university was an arm of the Ministry of Education with little ability to set its
own strategic direction.
Academic independence from direct state control was secured in the USA as an
outcome of the Supreme Court decision in the Dartmouth College case of 1819. A schism
at Dartmouth College left two groups struggling for control. One group reorganised as
Dartmouth University and tried to obtain control by having the state of New Hampshire
revise the charter that had established the college. The representatives of the original
college argued that the state could not revise a charter, once granted. In supporting this
position, the Court defined universities as “private eleemosynary institutions”, stating that
trustees and professors were not public officers nor were they extensions of “civil
government” [5]. The case had broader implications in the extension of its general
principles of institutional autonomy from charitable to business corporations.
The ability to take independent initiatives is based on the premise that the university
is not a subordinate element of a hierarchical administrative structure, such as a Ministry
of Higher Education. If a university system operates as it formerly did in Sweden, where
the Ministry of Higher Education decided how many students would be admitted each
year to each discipline, there is hardly a possibility to have sufficient autonomy on which
to base an entrepreneurial university. It has been argued that universities did not come
into independent existence in France until the 1970s, in a devolution that occurred as a
side effect of reforms made in response to the student movements of the 1960s.
 The evolution of the entrepreneurial university 71

To this day, European Professors are often selected through national competitions that
make a strategy, such as Terman’s “steeple building” at Stanford, making the creation of
a critical mass of professors on a special topic difficult, if not impossible, to realise.
Terman’s strategy was to identify a nascent field with theoretical and practical potential
and hire several professors with research specialties in this area, in effect forming a proto
centre, while linking them to departments in which they would teach more broadly than
their special research area. This strategy allowed the university to fulfil three missions
simultaneously that otherwise might have been at odds with each other.

Table 1 Expansion of university missions

Teaching Research Entrepreneurial

Preservation and 1st academic revolution 2nd academic revolution
dissemination of knowledge
New missions generate Two missions: teaching Third mission: economic and
conflict of interest andresearch social development; old
controversiesÆ missions continued

6 The first academic revolution

The first academic revolution took place in the late 19th and early 20th century, when
research became a legitimate function of the university. Although the term university had
been utilised since the medieval period, to refer to institutions for the preservation and
transmission of knowledge, the modern university can be traced to the Humboldtian
model, emphasising the interconnection between teaching and research; the university
and the nation state [6]. Indeed, the incorporation of research as an academic mission,
especially in the historical sciences, was part of a state building project. Scientific
research was supported both for practical benefits expected and to enhance national
prestige. Thus, a delegation of leading German scientists, Planck and Nernst, went to
Zurich to attract Einstein back to a chair in Berlin, after he had published his initial
groundbreaking papers [7].
A series of organisational innovations in teaching and research laid the groundwork
for the entrepreneurial university. The research university emerged as an institutional
format in the late 19th century by bringing together two activities, teaching and research,
which had previously developed separately in colleges and scientific societies. Whilst
research was introduced by law, as a specific task of Swedish universities, in 1916, an
embryonic entrepreneurial academic dynamic originated in the US university, due to the
circumstances in which research was introduced.
The paucity of research funds in the USA affected the way in which academics,
imbued with the research ethic, pursued their goal during the late 19th century. Lack of a
formal research funding system, apart from agriculture, placed a premium on individual
and collective initiatives to obtain resources to support original investigation. By that
time, loose interpretations of hierarchical German academic models of investigation
appeared in the emerging research universities of the USA. Departments with relative
autonomy of professors in different grades replaced professorships with a support
staff [8].
72 H. Etzkowitz

The reinterpretation of the research university model on a more egalitarian and

democratic basis had, as its side effect, the broadening of the introduction of an
entrepreneurial ethos into US academia. A larger number of professors, at various stages
of their academic careers, had the responsibility to seek research support. An assistant
professor in a US university has considerable ability to set research direction, especially
if he or she can convince an outside funding source. With relatively modest financial
support, graduate students assist the professor, and each other, at the same time as they
receive their training. US academic entrepreneurship, in an initial sense of obtaining
funds from external sources to support research, became part of the academic enterprise
even in universities where translating research results into practical uses was looked at
askance.

7 The second academic revolution

The first academic revolution sowed the seeds of the second by providing the research
base from which knowledge could be capitalised. However, the practical implications of
much academic research were not attended to, due to the creation of an ethic of academic
autonomy that took strong root in a group of liberal arts research universities that abjured
this task. In the late 19th century, a clear demarcation was attempted between the
university and other institutional spheres through the creation of an ideology of basic
research. The basic or ‘pure’ research model was propounded most notably by Henry
Rowland, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University, in his Presidential Address to the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in the late 19th century.
Rowland proposed a model of starting from curiosity driven science moving to applied
research and eventually to long-term benefits.
At the same time, universities specialising in applied research for agriculture and
industry, the ‘land grant’ foundations in the USA and polytechnic institutions in
Europe temporarily met this need. However, this organisational differentiation eventually
broke down due to internal and external causes: the inevitable production of research
results with practical implications in universities ostensibly devoted to basic research,
on the one hand; and external demand for greater utility from public research funding,
on the other.
In recent decades, these processes have collapsed into each other again, opening up
opportunities for scientific entrepreneurship.
Informal transfer through consultation, faculty student relationships and ‘knowledge
flows’ through publication are being superseded by more formal mechanisms that not
only package the technology into discrete sets of rights but also advance the exploration
of its commercial potential. There are several points of entry to the university for
independent investors and firms seeking technology including: direct access to research
groups, mediated access through technology transfer offices and through incubators. Each
offers the possibility of access to potential investments at different stages of the research
and commercialisation process.
 The evolution of the entrepreneurial university 73

Figure 1 Co-evolution and multi-linearity of university-industry relations

Research group
(quasi- firm)
Entrepreneur
Knowledge-flow
Publication
Liaison office
Graduates
Consultation
(Individuals)
Research
Contract Technology
transfer office
Intellectual property
Patent Incubator
License Technology
Entrepreneur
Firm-formation
Graduates
(Organizations)

The development of an assisted linear model of technology transfer begins with a liaison
office, going a step beyond producing trained graduates and publications to take
knowledge out of the university. Universities have established liaison offices to facilitate
contacts, formalising the process by which firms often make their own contacts through
former students and personal connections. An individual liaison officer may take
responsibility for organising interactions between a department or research unit and a
group of interested firms. This may take the form of individual meetings, possibly
leading to consultation contracts or presentations of a unit’s work, typically through
graduate student talks, to a group of firms on a regular basis.
In a second stage, knowledge is encapsulated in a technology and moved out by a
technology transfer office created to identify, patent, market and license intellectual
property. The technology transfer office operates as a dual search mechanism, pulling
technology out of university research groups, and finding a place for it. In recent years,
universities have explored various ways to add value to early stage university
technologies by conducting marketing surveys, seeking development support and
embodying the technology in a firm.
In a third stage, knowledge and technology is embodied in a firm and moved out of
the university by an entrepreneur. Firm formation from academic research was an
informal activity for many years, beginning with instrumentation companies arising from
work at MIT and Harvard in the late 19th century. The initial formalisation of this
process took place through the invention of the venture capital firm, which provided an
external support structure for firm formation projects that were often initially located in
available space in academic buildings. The incubator, a formal organisation providing
space and other assistance to nascent firms emanating from academic research, was
introduced during the early 1980s at Renssellear Polytechnic Institute, a school lacking a
tradition of firm formation, and has been widely utilised since.
A growing number of universities are willing to use a small portion of their
endowment funds to capitalise new firms, from campus as well as other sources, often in
association with other investors [9]. This can be seen as the latest stage in a long-term
movement of endowment managers to a more risk intensive investment strategy, having
74 H. Etzkowitz

previously shifted from a concentration on preferred stocks in the pre-war period to

common stocks in the post-war. Business expertise that was formerly marginalised within
the university, in bursaries and other specialised offices, is being expanded to do business
in the larger society, based upon the financial capital that can be realised from academic
research.

8 The diffusion of the entrepreneurial academic model

During the 1970s and 1980s, academic-industry relations developed rapidly in the USA
in response to increased international competition. The incremental evolution of products
within existing industries was inadequate to ensure economic growth. Academia was thus
brought into new, relatively independent, alignment with industry. There was both a need
to introduce new technologies into existing industries and to create industries based on
new technology. There were precursors earlier in the century for accomplishment of this
task, but integration of research with application is now the basis of a policy for civilian
technology development, a model previously confined to the military sector [10].
Although the increase or decrease of funding certainly has an effect on academic and
other institutions, such trends can just as easily rigidify existing structures, expanding or
contracting them along existing lines, as well as inducing their reform. The reorganisation
of the university is more fundamentally driven by changes in knowledge production and
utilisation as new forms of knowledge are created through the intersection of academic,
industrial and government interests. A new set of scientific disciplines has recently been
created, such as molecular biology, computer science and materials science, that
simultaneously exhibit both theoretical and practical implications, rather than the latter
emerging after a long time delay. Thus, the attainment of theoretical advance is closely
related to technological innovation and vice versa.

9 The Swedish entrepreneurial university

An entrepreneurial university can also be based on teaching, by introducing

entrepreneurial training into the curriculum. European universities have established
training programs in entrepreneurship, designed to create firms as well as educate
students in the new discipline. In this model, which has been explicitly developed in
Sweden, students are expected to play the entrepreneurial role in taking research out of
the university and turning it into firms. Firm formation is less tied to advanced research,
although it may be based upon it, but is more connected to what has been taught in
entrepreneurship courses.
Although US universities increasingly have entrepreneurship training programs in
their business schools and ‘greenhouses’ to encourage student entrepreneurs, there is a
greater focus in Europe on student, rather than faculty, entrepreneurs, in part, because of
differences in academic norms and cultures. The focus on educating entrepreneurs and
training groups of students as firms may explain some of the rapid rise in firm formation
in Sweden, a country previously noted for its complex of large technology firms tied to a
comprehensive social welfare system.
 The evolution of the entrepreneurial university 75

Many Swedish academic spin-off firms arise from teaching programs in

Entrepreneurship, linked to faculty research. For example, the Entrepreneurship Center at
Linkoping University produces 100 spin-offs per year from its training activities and
through extensions of its program at other Swedish universities. In the Linkoping model,
students move from courses into pre-incubator facilities, where they can try out their
ideas and develop their business plan with advice from consultants recruited from
industry. The best prospects are then invited into an incubator facility, often with funding
arranged. The Entrepreneurship Center at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, trains
groups of students who first go through a recruitment and application process that
encourages the development of a firm formation concept and then evaluates it as the basis
for acceptance into the program [11].
The role of students in European academic entrepreneurship is not new. It can be seen
especially in the foundation of chemical and optical firms, often by the students of
leading academic researchers, e.g. Zeiss Jena in Germany in the mid to late 19th century.
These firms typically maintained contact with academia through consulting relationships
that persisted through the generations. As some of these firms have downsized in recent
years, some of the traditional formats for university-industry relationships have declined
at academic institutions such as Milan Polytechnic.

10 The Brazilian entrepreneurial university

The Brazilian entrepreneurial academic model can be seen as a synthesis of the US and
European variants. Academic entrepreneurship emerged in Brazil as a survival strategy
when research funding precipitously declined in the early 1980s. Research as an explicit
academic mission had only recently been introduced into an academic system with
largely training functions, despite the long-time existence of a few specialised research
units. Universities that were determined to persist in this new mission looked to develop
new sources of material and ideological support for this goal and the means to realise it.
The incubator was imported from the USA as an organisational format to translate
academic research into economic activity [12].
Academic entrepreneurship also took a broader format to address social problems as
well as economic issues. Thus, the incubator concept was translated from a high tech
business firm development format into a low tech service cooperative initiative,
translating the organisational expertise developed in the initial project to address the deep
inequalities endemic to Brazilian society [13]. Entrepreneurial education was also
introduced as part of general education, rather than being confined to engineering and
business students, the traditional human resource of entrepreneurial activities. Just as
students learn to write an essay expressing their personal thoughts, or a scientific report
utilising evidence to support a thesis, so they are also being taught to write a business
plan, setting forth an objective and the means to realise it, along with a ‘market test’ [14].
Academic entrepreneurship thus becomes part of the teaching mission of the
university, intruding an entrepreneurial ethos to a broader population on the grounds that
it is equally relevant to the arts and social sciences as to engineering and the sciences; to
low tech as well as high tech ventures. Academic entrepreneurship is being translated to a
non-academic population through the popular cooperatives and other university
originated social programs.
76 H. Etzkowitz

11 Conclusion: the entrepreneurial university

The contemporary entrepreneurial university is the latest step in an academic progression

in which the new task emanates as a controversial departure from previously accepted
academic missions and eventually is integrated with the old and becomes accepted in its
own right. These transitions were controversial: for some academics, the introduction of
economic and social development as an academic mission called into question the
purpose of the university as a research institution, just as the introduction of research as
an academic mission disturbed the taken for granted assumption of the university as a
single purpose educational institution.
Research is now accepted as a traditional academic mission but this was not always
the case. When, in the late 19th century, a few research-oriented professors at Stanford
University argued that research should be an equal mission in the university, along with
teaching, many traditional professors objected, arguing that the mission of the university
is education. However, those faculty members who were conducting research typically
responded that, by discovering new knowledge, we can raise the training of the students
to a higher level. It is more productive for them to undertake research as a way of
learning, and participate with us in our research, as well as passively sitting and learning
through lectures. Thus, there was a debate and a discussion over whether this new
mission of research should be accepted within the university. A ‘game of legitimation’
took place, in which the new objective was tied to the old task. Moreover, it was held that
the two activities were more productively undertaken together than carried out separately.
To this day, there is a tension between research and teaching in the university. It is a
question that will never be settled, but it is a productive tension because professors have
found that they do better research if they are working with students. It also helps in the
training of students to be doing research. Nevertheless, overemphasis on one or the other
task produces conflicts of obligation. For example, if the professor becomes too involved
in research and moves away from education then that creates a problem and tension in the
university. This tension persists but, nevertheless, it is found to be more productive and
cost effective to pursue these two missions together. That is why integration of research
and teaching are incorporated into more universities worldwide.
Similarly, we are experiencing a debate about whether this third mission of economic
and social development should be integrated into the university [14]. Again, there are
objections that it conflicts with research for the researcher to be involved in translating
the research into a technology and product. Indeed, conflicts emerge between the
financial interest in the company and following the research idea as an end in itself.
However, these are conflicts that are managed, as rules are established to regulate
participation in firm formation, just as the one-fifth rule was established early in the 20th
century to regulate consultation. Indeed, the new rules are often extensions of those
previously worked out to regulate previous conflicts.
It can be expected that this new function of economic and social development will be
integrated into the university much as research was integrated with teaching in an earlier
era, with incubators adjoining classroom and laboratory facilities. Conducting the
activities separately is not as productive of basic research or applied research or
technology and new product development. It is more productive to see innovation as
non-linear, where basic research problems can come out of practical issues as well as
problems in a discipline. As each new mission is incorporated within the university, it
restructures how the previous one is carried out. Because research is assumed to be an
 The evolution of the entrepreneurial university 77

academic mission, students are taught how to do it, thus making it part of the educational
mission.
Similarly, economic development provides a new legitimation for research as it
contributes to expanding that activity. The second academic revolution also expands the
number of universities. As the thesis of knowledge-based economic development takes
hold, every region wants its own university. Attracting the best students and professors in
some areas becomes an economic development strategy that expands the growth of the
academic enterprise. Some of these changes are internal developments within the
academy, such as the development of the research group that has firm-like qualities.
Thus, the research university shares homologous qualities with a start-up firm, even
before it directly engages in entrepreneurial activities.

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