Abstract:

Knowledge has become an essential element of today’s society, where education, science and technology have taken key roles when it comes to everyday life (Scott, 1997). The role and value that has been given to knowledge has influenced the role of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) around the world (Etzkowitz, 1983; Clark, 1998; Baaken et al. 2012). Since the early 18th century, HEIs have been both education and research oriented organisations. It was more recently that HEIs have begun to engage with external stakeholders such as business, thereby adding a third mission to their organisation (Etzkowitz, Leydesdorff, 1997). It can be questioned if this change has always been completely voluntarily given the reduction in public funding available (Carayol, 2003). However, there are clear indicators that HEIs have become an actor that is actively engaged with business also for other reasons beyond financial gain (Baaken et al. 2012). Over the past years several terms have been coined describing this new concept such as Third Generation University (Wissema, 2009), Entrepreneurial University (Etzkowitz, 1983; Etzkowitz, 1988), Engaged University (Hollander, 2009) and Civic University (Goddard et al., 2013).

The European Commission DG EAC has launched a major initiative to investigate Europe’s status-quo of University-Business Cooperation. The aim of this research is to get a more profound, comprehensive and up to date understanding of the state of UBC in Europe, from the perspective of both the HEIs and the business sector – what is the state of play of UBC in the different countries, what are the main drivers and barriers for the different stakeholders and at what levels; understanding the regulatory framework and socio-economic conditions and what kind of measures/initiatives exist on a regional / national level to support the development of UBC. The main elements of this study are a large-scale European quantitative survey, 50 good practice case studies and 26 qualitative interviews.

Through a large quantitative survey, with more than 17,000 academic and higher education institution managers, we learned that although universities have become more engaged with their external environment in teaching and research, they’re staying behind on their entrepreneurial outputs. Based on our quantitative results, we will show that student and academic entrepreneurship activities are underdeveloped. However, through the wide number of good practice case studies, we will provide a number of solutions to increase the impact of universities on entrepreneurial activities and change their regional entrepreneurial environment.

Keywords:

Student entrepreneurship, academic entrepreneurship, university-business cooperation, valorization.