Reinventing Learning and Research in the Twenty-First Century via the Academic Firm and the Entrepreneurial University

Abstract

Universities were a European “invention” to explore, seek, and develop new ideas and knowledge starting with the Socratic “Peripatetic School” and then moving on to the religious or monastic-type institutes of higher learning that evolved into the modern universities worldwide (the names Bologna, Oxford, etc. come to mind). In the year 1088 was founded in Bologna, the major educational innovation of the second millennium, known as “academic university”. Universities have evolved in a Darwinian-almost sense to become fully global/local (gloCal) engines of knowledge generation and drivers of economic development and prosperity worldwide via the transfer and commercialization of this knowledge which alludes to the role of the “entrepreneurial university” and the “academic firm” as conceptual starting points as well as “Mode 3” knowledge production and the “Quadruple Helix” . “Mode 3” emphasizes the co-opetition, co-specialization, and co-evolution (ibid) of a pluralism of knowledge production modes (as juxtaposed to Modes 1 and 2 ). “Quadruple Helix” extends the university-industry-government interrelations by a fourth “media and culture-based helix” (paraphrased as “public” or “civil society”). Debates in recent years underscored the importance the “entrepreneurial university” plays for advanced knowledge creation, diffusion, and use and for innovation in the gloCal (global and local) knowledge economy and society. That discourse obviously challenges or provokes the following set of research questions: The entrepreneurial university could be seen as a one-sided adaptation of universities to the world of business. 1 Therefore, does the entrepreneurial university not demand the “academic firm”? 2 Should we expect a co-evolution of entrepreneurial universities and academic firms—in the increasingly hybrid overlapping and diverse knowledge architecture (Mode 3) of university-business interrelations (Quadruple Helix) in the gloCal knowledge economy and society? Student mobility and intellectual exchanges are qualifying elements of “Mode 3” and the “Quadruple Helix”. In particular, in the years to come, student mobility—a notion that is at the same time new and traditional—will be the product of matchmaking “academic firms” and “entrepreneurial universities” operating in different countries. These institutions should reflect on it in a more thorough way to account both for the new avenues to entrepreneurship—as it is that of global born/stateless/cross-border/cross-cultural international start-ups—and new challenges start-ups incubated in their environment have to face in the years to come.