Abstract
This study provides new insights into the entrepreneurial role of universities in an entrepreneurial discovery process. Over the past decades, European policies have encouraged universities to identify opportunities and develop new partnerships and connections with society. This analysis focuses on the Vestfold region of Norway, which contains an institutionally rich and specialised electronic industry, supported by a university college. The development of entrepreneurial discovery as a process capability at the regional level is examined using qualitative analysis based on semi-structured interviews. Regional actors developed regional innovation capabilities based on a bottom-up entrepreneurial discovery approach, in which a local university college played an active role. Entrepreneurial discovery capabilities entail a rigorous assessment of the region’s knowledge base, experimentation and the institutionalisation of new collaborative work forms that mobilise industry–university interaction aimed at identifying and facilitating the emergence and growth of new domains. The article highlights the challenges and opportunities of a bottom-up entrepreneurial discovery approach and concludes with policy implications.
Highlights
This study provides new insights into the entrepreneurial role of universities in an entrepreneurial discovery process
The result of a successful entrepreneurial discovery process (EDP) is assumed to create innovation and system changes that affect industrial development in a specific region and industry (Hausmann and Rodrik, 2003). These changes call for system-level entrepreneurs – individuals, organisations, or groups of actors who are receptive to the ideas of entrepreneurs – to identify priorities, mobilise resources, build entrepreneurial knowledge and facilitate the emergence and growth of new activities aimed at creating new system changes or transforming existing systems (Isaksen et al, 2018)
The purpose of this paper is to identify the challenges and opportunities experienced by Vestfold University College in building EDP capabilities by responding to new policy schemes and companies’ novel ways of searching for knowledge
Summary
One of the dominant conceptual points of reference for policies aiming to strengthen innovation-based regional development is the RIS framework. Evidence from evolutionary economics shows that regions are more likely to branch into industries that are technologically related to pre-existing industries through path dependency and place-specific knowledge transfer mechanisms that connect the new industry to existing industries (Boschma and Frenken, 2011). In this context, path dependency is used to explain how the inherited local knowledge base of an industry is influenced by its past history or the regional economy along one development path rather than another through the effects of diversification processes, policy making and events (Martin and Sunley, 2010)
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