Abstract/Summary

This thesis contributes to the growing body of literature on entrepreneurial university and the role stakeholders play within the universities. It develops a framework for conceptualising the entrepreneurial university from stakeholders’ perspective by interrogating literature, as well as secondary and primary sources. Despite the increasing body of literature on the concept of the entrepreneurial university, it is still under-theorized. The literature on the entrepreneurial university, starting from the first publications of B. Clark up until recent studies, most were focused on case studies that have not been analytically driven and have not analysed different types of universities and their attributes and stakeholders they collaborate with. This gap in the literature of entrepreneurial universities inspired this study aim, which is to develop the analytical framework that can be applied as a tool to recognise entrepreneurial patterns in different university types. An entrepreneurial university is considered as an institution that has three missions simultaneously or teaching, research and entrepreneurship. This has been developed as a "compass" to characterise an ideal type of entrepreneurial university. This study argues that universities apply different business models to pursue entrepreneurship and get different entrepreneurial outcomes via collaborating with a diverse range of stakeholders. University business models towards entrepreneurship have been initially developed by Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff (2000) and applying stakeholders’ perspective have been tested within this study where availability of different actors seems to play a significant role for universities to achieve particular entrepreneurial outcomes. Our results show that while some universities (research-oriented) are getting entrepreneurial outcomes performing three missions simultaneously (teaching, research and entrepreneurship) others (teaching-oriented) can still have entrepreneurial outcomes fulfilling two university missions (teaching and entrepreneurship). This adds a new development to the entrepreneurial university as a phenomenon. The case of the analysis for the purpose of this research has been the UK higher education system as a good example of universities which has utilised university missions to different extents. Applying mix method approach (quantitative and qualitative), the framework developed is shown to reveal characteristics of different universities within one country which can be used to develop policy actions. The results of this study show that the UK higher education system has both classic and entrepreneurial universities which achieve particular entrepreneurial outcomes while collaborating with different actors. To achieve higher entrepreneurial outcomes the role of Business Incubators and nurturing of business as well as commercialisation skills in faculty seems to be playing a key role. First, this study utilised secondary data at the organisational level to build the architecture of entrepreneurial universities within different university types in the UK. Second, individual level data have been collected by the means of a survey to test the concept and was supported by in-depth interviews with academics and university managers. This approach improves the validity of the research and provides a rich overview of universities and their environment. Finally, the study provides a framework that characterises entrepreneurial universities along with many context-neutral dimensions which could take the research forward. The novelty of using case of the country higher education system as an empirical study added a new contribution to the field. In addition, this study contributes to a better understanding of policy actions with regard to entrepreneurial transformation.