Informal university entrepreneurship: The missing link in transition higher education systems

Abstract

This article probes the transition of an emerging higher education system into the entrepreneurial model. Tunisia’s alignment with the European Bologna Process reforms in 2008 was meant to ease graduates’ transition to the job market through enhancing their employability skills as well as injecting them with an entrepreneurial proclivity to mainstream self-employment as a worthy career path. Several measures were introduced across public universities, including a transversal entrepreneurship module and a corresponding entrepreneurship support structure of technology transfer office and incubators. North’s new institutional lens will be used to frame the discussion analytically. The article goes beyond such formal interventions and particularly looks into the informal aspects of the newly-assumed entrepreneurial identity of Tunisian higher education. Following a scoping review approach informed by PRISMA-ScR guidelines, it investigates some informal matters on the shop floor to ascertain the extent to which the new identity has been established more than a decade after the introduction of the reforms. It looks into the profile of the purpose-hired teaching staff entrusted with delivering the cross-curricular entrepreneurship module; students’ and academics’ networks and rapport with the staff of the recently-established support structure; as well as their openness to the Tunisian entrepreneurial ecosystem. Empirical findings from the scoping review suggest a misalignment between progressive formal measures on the one hand and, on the other, a persistently unconducive university environment structured along deep-seated collegial values and quite decoupled from the realities of its national ecosystem.