All internal and external stakeholders have a role in supporting an HEI’s entrepreneurial and innovative agenda. An entrepreneurial and innovative HEI understands the value of engaging with multiple external stakeholders to establish synergies. Therefore, it promotes a culture of collaboration within the HEI to build synergies with its entrepreneurial ecosystem. It encourages staff to exploit knowledge exchange and collaboration opportunities, it rewards and recognises collaborative efforts through career progression and gives guidance on how to develop and nurture collaborative relationships.[1]

Staff and students are important internal stakeholders of an entrepreneurial HEI and ideally are working together to create dialogue and linkages across the organisation and beyond its borders. However, traditional boundaries and silos between administration and faculties, faculty and students, and management and non-management can make this challenging and resource intensive.

Breaking down boundaries, developing integration and creating synergies is an incremental process, from firstly creating awareness of the entrepreneurial agenda to the establishment of mechanisms to coordinate and build relationships across the institution. Connecting staff is an important step towards changing attitudes and towards fostering an entrepreneurial culture in an organisation.

Regular exchange and consultation meetings between academic and administrative staff and senior management could be a good starting point. The objective of a cross-staff exchange and consultation process is to create an environment which: enhances exchange and collaboration; identifies and addresses barriers; promotes awareness of what an entrepreneurial organisation entails; and leads, in the long run, to the emergence of an entrepreneurial culture in the organisation.

Such meetings allow staff to keep up to date with current developments and to get to know each other personally. In these meetings, staff can express their views and concerns about how the entrepreneurial agenda links with their personal development. Examples of meeting occasions include:

• Get-togethers over breakfast, lunch or coffee, with informal updates by different groups; and,
• Formal information meetings and regular retreats to debate and work on specific topics
  • Business games across faculties

Furthermore, the senior management can encourage and reward initiatives that cross/remove faculty boundaries. These could include, for example:

• Support for interdisciplinary student entrepreneurship ventures (e.g., business consultancy in interdisciplinary teams)
• Joint courses across faculties (not only entrepreneurship-related but, for example, related to business ethics or innovation in general), and
• Cross-faculty summer schools
   

[1] See more in the Entrepreneurial ecosystem and networks dimension