Entrepreneurship is a major part of the HEI’s strategy

Higher education students and graduates aim to achieve success when they complete higher education to follow their passion and create a future for themselves. In an increasingly globalised world, it is now recognised that this requires more than subject-specific knowledge and related skill sets. It is important for staff and students to recognise that there are certain behaviours, skills and attitudes that are essential for surviving and succeeding in environments with high levels of uncertainty and unpredictability. 

Promoting entrepreneurship in higher education includes both entrepreneurial mindset development and support for new venture creation. Only a minority of students are likely to establish a start-up and run their own business during their studies or directly after graduation. However, the majority of employers and firms – of all shapes and sizes and in a diversity of sectors – seek to enhance their innovative capacity and become (more) entrepreneurial. This enables companies to search for novel ways to cope with and to benefit from ever increasing levels of unpredictability and complexity. These employers are looking for enterprising and innovative individuals. Therefore, entrepreneurship has relevance across all aspects of higher education, and HEIs should provide their students and graduates with the capacity to think and behave entrepreneurially within all kinds of environments.

Being entrepreneurial applies both to the organisation as a whole and to its constituting individuals. Organisational culture and values can tie the organisation and the individual together. For a broad acceptance of entrepreneurship, from top management, senior level of the institution, to all other stakeholders both within and outside the higher education institution, the relevance of entrepreneurship will therefore need to be demonstrated. The involvement of key external stakeholders – from business, government and civil society – into the governing board of an HEI can help with this. The task of the governing board is to guide the establishment of strategic objectives and to oversee organisational change and development processes.

Having a clear and widely known strategy is also important. The strategy should state specific objectives for the entrepreneurial agenda, which are associated to key performance indicators, for example:

  • Generate entrepreneurial motivation, cognition, and attitudes;
  • Generate entrepreneurial competences and skills;
  • Support business start-ups; commercialise research results through technology transfers; and
  • Generate revenues for the institution from spin-off activities; strengthen co-operation between the institution and local firms.

The objectives and key performance indicators of the entrepreneurial agenda need to be monitored and reviewed on a regular basis. It is possible to build an organisational scorecard for this purpose which can be used for a comprehensive analysis of the HEI, including organisation design, financial leverage, public value, alumni, etc. [1] 

A long-term overall objective might be to develop entrepreneurship as a fundamental part of organisational culture and values. The aim is that, in the long run, entrepreneurial practices become an integral part of daily professional life. To this end, an HEI could, for example:

  • Include in its staff performance review system the opportunity for all staff to demonstrate how they have supported the entrepreneurial agenda.
  • Provide highly visible public recognition by senior management of lecturers, researchers and other staff members or students that have applied entrepreneurial thinking or behaviours, which resulted into wider organisational benefits.
  • Include entrepreneurial learning outcomes in the validation of all the teaching and learning programmes across all subject areas.

In achieving all this, the most difficult barriers to overcome could be intellectual or ideological beliefs of academic staff. These may result from misperceptions and myths about the meanings, values and purposes of entrepreneurship. The leadership challenge lies in engaging these viewpoints and providing alternative interpretations that can have resonance and meaning for teaching and research, especially across the different contexts of an HEI. These should fit into a shared vision of the future, and a strategy for organisational and individual development. The emphasis is on providing a strong rationale and academic argument for promoting entrepreneurship across the whole institution, across all subjects and for all levels of study.

The role of leadership is to provide a strategic roadmap that enshrines a shared set of values and common purpose and demonstrates capacity to allow for diversity of opinions. The strategic roadmap needs to be articulated in a simple format and widely communicated throughout the HEI, on a regular basis, within its strategic network, and beyond. This is an important method to publicly express entrepreneurship culture and values. On their own, however, a strategy and a roadmap, do not create a culture. Indeed, they can be counter-productive if only seen as institutional rhetoric and not backed up by examples, actions, and role models.

 


[1] See Gibb (2012) in the Annals of Innovation and Entrepreneurship for a comprehensive example of a scorecard.

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