Entrepreneurial Universities: Creating Institutional Innovation in Times of Turbulence

Adesola, Sola; Datta, Surja

This book explores the idea of the “Entrepreneurial University” within the institutional environment that focuses on the production, dissemination, and exploitation of knowledge. This chapter suggests that the university’s entrepreneurial behaviour needs to be conceptualised within the institutional perspective of “rules of the game”, which simultaneously constrain and facilitate interactions of the key players. The idea of the “Innovation Triad” focuses our attention on the knowledge-based institutional environment and identifies the key actors and interactions: rule makers (RMs), knowledge entrepreneurs (KEs), and knowledge incubators (KIs) (Datta and Adesola, International Journal of Technology Management and Sustainable Development 17 (3): 197–202, 2018). The book makes important theoretical and empirical contributions to the burgeoning literature on academic entrepreneurship, and sets out the three-part structure of macro- (institutional environment), meso- (inter-organisational), and micro- (intra-organisational) level aspects of the Entrepreneurial University.