The Character of the Entrepreneurial University

Abstract

How are entrepreneurial universities initially formed and how do they sustain themselves? In Creating Entrepreneurial Universities (Pergamon-Elsevier, 1998), I traced developments in a few European universities from 1980 to 1995 to determine how they had gone about significantly changing the way they operated—how they moved to a much more proactive style. I argued that five pathways of transformation could be induced from these cases: diversified funding base; strengthened steering core; expanded developmental periphery; stimulated academic heartland; and integrated entrepreneurial culture. More recently, my latest book, Sustaining Change in Universities: Continuities in Case Studies and Concepts (Open University Press, 2004), substantially expands on that earlier analysis and provides a further look at the evolving character of the entrepreneurial university. In the new book I searched for exemplars of entrepreneurial action—and stronger conceptualization. I turned to 14 internationally distributed case studies to clarify anew the earlier stated pathways of transformation and, further, to suggest dynamics that produce a new steady state committed to ongoing change. Five narratives pursue sustaining developments during the late 1990s in the European universities previously studied: the University of Warwick in England, the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, the University of Twente in the Netherlands, the University of Joensuu in Finland, and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Three new accounts, drawn from the work of other scholars, portray transformed universities in Africa (University of Makerere in Uganda), Latin America (Catholic University of Chile), and Australia (Monash University). Additional brief narratives report on six diverse research universities in the United States (two private, four public), which exemplify aggressive institution building under the spur of intense competition—Stanford and MIT, Michigan and UCLA, North Carolina State University and Georgia Institute of Technology. The newly highlighted dynamics of change stress, first, mutually supportive interaction among transforming elements; second, a newly established forward-looking “perpetual momentum”; and, third, behind the scenes, an institutionalized volition, a collective will, stimulates and guides a self-sustaining and self-selecting forcefulness in responding to societal demands. In one case after another, we find an assertive “bureaucracy of change”: such professional staff as development officers, grants and contracts officers, and continuing education officers—nonacademic personnel who are much more forward-oriented than the traditional “administrative” staff who served on behalf of the funding public authority and higher regulatory boards and councils. We see the overall sustaining capacity become a virtual steady state of change, a character not dependent on a commanding CEO or a brilliant management team. Change becomes a habit, an institutionalized state of being. Since each university is unique in combining common elements with particular features, the case studies produce “amplifying variations” of the overall themes. Chalmers, in Sweden, illuminates particularly well how to generate centers of initiative in a small to medium-size university; the Catholic University of Chile dramatizes how to modernize an old-fashioned faculty in a decade and a half; the University of Michigan reveals how a massive public university, busily multiplying resources, can match up against the sharp competition of the richest private universities in the world. The exhibited variations are as much a source of transferable insight as the old and new concepts that bring formal order to wide-ranging empirical examination of very complex entities. Case study narratives additionally weave uniquenesses around common elements and their amplifying variations. There is, finally, only one MIT, one Twente, one Monash.