A regional perspective on the entrepreneurial university: Practices and policies

The role of universities has evolved dramatically in recent years in both advanced economies and developing nations. Once largely focused on teaching and research within ëivory towerí settings, universities now undertake a variety of additional knowledge transfer activities with commercial benefit to them and have consequently become more entrepreneurial (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 1997, 2000; Etzkowitz, 1998; Gibb et al., 2009). This change reflects a major shift in expectations to their role as economic drivers that should make an active contribution to regional development and engage with the wider society on various scales (Chatterton and Goddard, 2000; Goddard, 2009). Entrepreneurship is becoming more integrated into the general education agenda of universities in order to build an entrepreneurship-friendly culture, which could improve the entrepreneurial performance of institutions, and in consequence serve the wider economy. In the aftermath of the world financial and economic crisis, an increasingly important role ascribed to universities is converting knowledge and scientific breakthroughs into economic success, in order to promote recovery from recession (Kitson et al., 2009). This is by no means a straightforward task and much of the extant discourse tends to focus on the examples of best practices, that is, extraordinary universities in competitive regions, while other analyses have examined the development of entrepreneurial universities in a specific region (Jauhiainen and Suorsa, 2008; Saad and Zawdie, 2011).