Transformative change in higher education: entrepreneurial universities and high-technology entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT

Public policies focusing on the higher education landscape often pursue a paradigm shift among universities that may ultimately lead to the transformation towards entrepreneurial universities. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether a higher education policy-induced transformation significantly influenced regional high-technology entrepreneurship. We thereby focus on the German Excellence Initiative, a higher education policy intervention designed to foster and support the transformative change of German universities towards an entrepreneurial paradigm. Our results reveal that the German Excellence Initiative had a positive and significant impact on regional high-technology entrepreneurship. Our results further show that the higher the interaction with industry, the more conducive universities become for regional high-technology entrepreneurship. In addition, universities’ overarching scientific focus decisively affects regional high-technology entrepreneurship. Based on our results, we conclude our paper by outlining implications for policy makers, high-technology entrepreneurs and university managers as well as present future avenues for research.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurship
• high-technology entrepreneurship
• entrepreneurial universities
• Germany
• excellence initiative
• start-ups

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Germany consists of in total 96 RORs. However, for our empirical analysis, we only consider RORs that also inhere at least one university (in sum 63 RORs). Hence, we compare university regions that have received funding from the Excellence Initiative (in sum 32 RORs) with university regions that have not received any funding from the Excellence Initiative (in sum 31 RORs).