The role of higher education for the development of entrepreneurial ecosystems

1. Universities as anchor organizations in an entrepreneurial ecosystem

Higher Education institutions (HEIs) and, in particular, universities play a well-established role as key agents in creating and promoting regional economic growth and competitiveness (Audretsch, Lehmann, and Hülsbeck 2012; Lehmann 2015; Bonaccorsi et al. 2013; Pinheiro, Langa, and Pausits 2015). Within this context, a vibrant and extensive literature examines the general contribution of universities within regional innovation regimes in general, mainly caused by spillover effects of teaching (education) and research (Audretsch and Lehmann 2005; Ghio et al. 2015) while another strand of the literature examines the support of the ‘third mission’ of universities by academic spin-offs (Siegel and Wright 2014; Meoli and Vismara 2016) or technology transfer and licenses offices (Sandström et al. 2018; Audretsch, Lehmann, and Wright 2014; Link, Siegel, and Wright 2014). Over the past decades, efforts to promote academic entrepreneurship, loosely defined as initiatives aimed to generate knowledge spillovers from university research leading to university spin-offs or new venture creation have been highlighted as an important catalyst to spur innovations and economic growth (Sandström et al. 2018). More recently, the role of universities has changed from sources of academic knowledge generation and providers of well-educated human capital incorporated in students and graduates (Audretsch and Lehmann 2005) towards vehicles for policymakers to promote growth and innovation through the Higher Education sector (Sandström et al. 2018). Consequently, universities are seen key actors in contributing to economic growth and fostering entrepreneurial behaviours and innovative activities, thereby being of benefit and support to private sector actors in achieving firm-level growth (Cunningham et al. 2019; Guerrero, Cunningham, and Urbano 2015).

As universities are at the centre of knowledge creation and exploitation, they are directly funded to implement a mix of innovation and entrepreneurship policy interventions, or, more often, indirectly supported through partnerships with industry (Civera, Meoli, and Vismara 2017). In order to conceptualize the structure and function of such ‘university-industry-entrepreneurship’ networks, academic research introduced the metaphor of ‘ecosystems’ (Colombo et al. 2019; Hayter 2016). In this context, ‘entrepreneurial ecosystems’ gains increasing popularity as a vehicle to describe, explain, advertise, and transport thoughts, frameworks, and opinions on how entrepreneurs interact with their environment as economic agents (Acs et al. 2018; Audretsch et al. 2019; Colombo et al. 2019). An entrepreneurial ecosystem is then characterized by the participation of entrepreneurial firms as an important output of economic systems and an important mechanism to explain the outcome of economic systems (Acs et al. 2018), a structure that fosters entrepreneurship, like financiers, sources of knowledge spillovers, suppliers or consumers, and governance, to coordinate and motivate entrepreneurial activities by setting rules and norms (Colombo et al. 2019). Within such an entrepreneurial ecosystem, HEIs and in particular universities play a key role as anchor organizations because they not only contribute to the continuing advance of science, technology, know-how and skills, but also by realizing a leadership role manifesting through the creation of entrepreneurial thinking universities fulfil their economic and social potential (Hayter 2016; Civera, Meoli, and Vismara 2019).

The interrelation of Higher Education and entrepreneurial ecosystem can be promoted at least in two dimensions: fostering and improving the internal structures and offers of HEIs, and external conditions given by Higher Education Policies and business surrounding. This Special Issue addresses two important questions in this context: What are those internal mechanisms that shape and secure a proper mode of action of HEIs to spur entrepreneurial ecosystems? How can external conditions given by policy as well as public and private institutions be set up and incentivized efficiently to spur entrepreneurial ecosystems?

The first question is concerned about the internal dimensions of HEIs, in particular universities. The last two decades have witnessed an increasing intensity of quality management in HEIs and quality discourses that were followed by debates about and attempts of evaluating the efficacy of quality management in the sector (Leiber, Stensaker, and Harvey 2018). University management increasingly highlights the third mission and ‘societal impact’ as one of the overarching goals of universities (Sandström et al. 2018). Universities contribute to innovation and entrepreneurial behaviour by teaching, strategic alignment and governance structures. Organizing teaching for upcoming challenges includes not only entrepreneurship education, digitalization or handling students’ dropouts. The way of teaching especially young researchers (Froehlich 2016) and considering specific requirements shapes the way graduates perceive and consequently act during and after their qualification – be it self-employed, in industry or science (Hasanefendic et al. 2017). A strategic alignment fosters and facilitates academic entrepreneurship, technology transfer and innovation. Basic research and scientific discourse in terms of, e.g. publications, are the foundation and direct link to technological and societal change. Further, this aspect includes the performance and efficiency of R&D collaborations, spin-off, patenting or licensing activities, how they are brought out and supported by individual researcher characteristics or university structures – that are also connected to the following aspect (Cunningham and Link 2015; Perkmann et al. 2013; Civera and Meoli 2018). Governance structures, including structural and leadership characteristics, inside the university were identified to trigger and foster scientific and entrepreneurial performance (Meoli, Pierucci, and Vismara 2018; Civera et al. 2020; Meoli, Paleari and Vismara, 2019). The structural side includes an appropriate level of flexibility, support efficiency and well-equipped facilities (Sporn 2001) while leadership elements include the level of hierarchy, incentive and control mechanisms, encouragement and personal characteristics of the governing bodies (Kirby 2006; Yokoyama 2006).

On the external dimension, all of the previously outlined internal aspects of Higher Education management can be supported and incubated by university environment and policy initiatives (Cunningham and Link 2015; Urbano and Guerrero 2013; Klemenčič 2018). An important policy approach has been established in the EU 20 years ago with the Bologna Process, strengthening the international recognition and therefore increasing the international competitiveness of the Higher Education system by reducing mobility barriers of students and academics (Klemenčič 2019; Wihlborg and Robson 2018). As a decentralized but coordinated intergovernmental process of 48 European countries, the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), it has a network-like model of governance, it directly shapes the hitherto bureaucratic governance model in which state actors have sole authority (Klemenčič 2019; Klemenčič and Galàn Palomares 2017). This unique international collaboration on Higher Education of countries with different political, cultural and academic traditions has become a co-shaper of an emerging global Higher Education agenda and governance architecture aiming to promote and co-shape the Higher Education global order (Asderaki 2019). A robust literature shows how regional and local entrepreneurial ecosystems have benefitted from the mobility of students and academics caused by the Bologna Process. Recently, Hunady, Orviska, and Pisar (2019) confirm that the share of foreign students play an important role in the formation of university spin-off.

Universities are a lively part of location policy by both contributing to regional welfare and being shaped by their environmental endowment (Lebeau and Cochrane 2015). In this context, academic entrepreneurship is dependent on efficient structures bridging the so-called knowledge filter and thus, also cross-country evaluations deepen the understanding of modes of action and are beneficial for evaluation. One important aspect to fulfil the role of an anchor organization in fostering and promoting the entrepreneurial ecosystem is the autonomy of a university as an organizational actor. In particular promoting and hiring key agents (Sanz-Menendéz and Cruz-Castro 2019), like principal investigators and star scientists, is an essential dimension of academic entrepreneurship. Recently, policy initiatives tried to nurture scientific performance (Daraio et al. 2019), e.g. the Excellence Initiative in different European countries (Sørensen, Bloch, and Young 2016; Menter, Lehmann, and Klarl 2018; Civera et al. 2018) or performance-based funding mechanisms (Auranen and Nieminen 2010; Cattaneo, Meoli, and Signori 2016; Meoli, Pierucci, and Vismara 2018). The common goal of those policy initiatives is to improve Higher Education systems and its socio-economic impact in a progressive society directly or indirectly targeting differing levels (Audretsch, Lehmann, and Paleari 2015; Dal Molin, Turri, and Agasisti 2016): university efficiency and governance (Agasisti and Haelermans 2016; Lehmann and Stockinger 2019), innovation and entrepreneurship (Thursby and Kemp 2002), or university output and performance (Froehlich 2016).

2. Overview of the papers included in the special issue

Applying and integrating theories, methodologies, and conceptions borrowed from multiple disciplinary fields, this special issue has called both qualitative and quantitative research to investigate the role of HEIs for the development of the entrepreneurial Ecosystem. The volume is therefore diversified, characterized by contributions from different fields. All the six papers in this special issue contribute to a better understanding of today’s research on entrepreneurial ecosystem, but they do so by addressing complementary perspectives. In these respects, the six contributions of this special issue can be classified in two groups: first, three papers analyse how the diversity of institutions in the Higher Education field differently participate to the Entrepreneurial ecosystem; second, three further papers specifically focus on the role of students.

The first group of papers takes an institutional perspective, and disentangle specificities in the participation in the entrepreneurial ecosystem by different types of institutions, with reference to different international context. These papers try to find answers on the first question, which is concerned about the internal dimensions of HEIs. In the first paper of this group, Tang and Chau (2020) discuss how, in the existing literature of knowledge exchange (KE) and higher education, there is a limited but an emerging cluster of research, which undertakes a comprehensive analysis of various types of HEIs and patterns of KE engagement. Employing the empirical example of Hong Kong, their paper examines the interconnections between institutional types and patterns of KE activities in the context of a global city, finding that during the short history of KE policies and activities, all public universities in Hong Kong have been building their capacities for this new intellectual premise in the last decade. Meanwhile, disciplinary comprehensiveness and research/education intensity of the universities affect their institutional responses to the global trend of KE. The typology of HEIs suggested by this paper puts forward a perspective to further understand the institutional patterns of KE in the twenty-first century.

Institutional diversification is also at the heart of the contribution by Lee and Müller (2019), analysing the effects of institutional stratification in higher education systems on graduates’ wages in engineering fields in Germany and Korea, by using survey data from the Korean 2013 Graduates Occupational Mobility Survey (GOMS) and the German 2013 Graduate Survey Cooperation Project (KOAB). For Korea, where the higher education system is hierarchically stratified by reputation, the study found clear effects of institutional stratification on graduates’ wages. For Germany, where the higher education system is primarily stratified horizontally by type of university and only lightly stratified hierarchically by reputation (although strategic networks are gradually changing this situation), the study found weak effects of institutional stratification on graduates’ wages. The study concludes that institutional stratification affects wages across different higher education systems, although to different degrees.

Third, Schenkenhofer and Wilhelm (2020) argue that, while research on universities is well elaborated within the field of higher education, less effort has been made to study other institutions of tertiary education. Complementary to the need of hybrid (specific and general) human capital of German Mittelstand firms, the system of tertiary dual education in Germany has well succeeded in catching two birds with one stone. Though Germany has often been criticised for its low rate of university graduates, the critique has largely failed to acknowledge the differentiation of Germany’s dual tertiary education models. By highlighting the case of Baden-Württemberg and its Cooperative State University system, the authors try to develop a better understanding for this particular university type, showing that the availability of a large pool of tertiary dual educated students contributes to the particular advantage of Mittelstand firms in Baden-Wuerttemberg.

The second group of papers in this special issue, rather than focussing on the overall contribution of HEIs to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, focus on the role of students. As noted above, the Bologna Process increased competition among HEIs within and between countries. Within this process, academic entrepreneurship, in particular entrepreneurial education has been one strategic focus of universities. In the first paper in this section, Pedro, Leitão, and Alves (2020) examine the still unexplored role played by the quality of academic life (QAL) related to higher education students in fostering regional development. This paper analyses the nature of the relationship between satisfaction and the QAL of HEI students, in order to evaluate whether the QAL is associated with the regional development of the HEIs’ surrounding areas. Based on a sample of 719 students from all Portuguese public universities, the analysis reveals a positive and significant relationship between service satisfaction and QAL and statistically negative influence of QAL on regional development, which raises important challenges in terms of future research efforts contrasting high versus low-density regions of HEI influence in the international context.

In the second paper of this section, Kemper, Vorhoff, and Wigger (2020) perform two approaches of machine learning, logistic regressions and decision trees, to predict student dropout at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). The models are computed on the basis of examination data, i.e. data available at all universities without the need of specific collection. The analysis shows that decision trees produce slightly better results than logistic regressions. However, both methods yield high prediction accuracies of up to 95% after three semesters. A classification with more than 83% accuracy is already possible after the first semester.

Last, Cattaneo et al. (2020) take a macro approach, comparing international policies to enhance the share of graduate people in the population. Although broadening equal access to higher education has been an objective public policy for decades, little is known about the effectiveness of alternative means for achieving this goal. Moreover, it has raised a need of explaining the heterogeneity in Higher Education attainment across European countries, where high level of graduate population can be observed both in presence of high and low level of fees. This paper surveys the extant literature providing some background on the economic concepts of higher education market, and reviews key determinants of demand and supply. A theoretical and empirical model of aggregate demand and supply of higher education is derived, with the aim to facilitate the understanding of the challenges in today’s higher education systems, as well as the opportunities for development. The model is validated on some exemplary case studies describing different relationship between the level of public investment and levels of graduate population.

Taken together, these papers offer a showcase of the current discussion on the role of HEIs in supporting the development of entrepreneurial ecosystem, and what are the challenges to be faced in the near future. The integration of both qualitative and quantitative approaches, as well as the multidisciplinary approach characterizing this special issue, make it possible to provide an in-depth understanding of today’s dynamics and derive new guidelines for future interventions. We believe that these contributions provide a valuable overview of what is going on nowadays in research on higher education impact, and offer to policy makers, institutional leaders and higher education stakeholders, fruit for reflections, debate and further research.

Acknowledgements

This special issue was originated by the international conference ‘Higher Education in modern Ecosystems: Efficiency, Society and Policies’, March 12–14, 2018, University of Augsburg, Germany, organized by the Cisalpino Institute for Comparative Studies in Europe, University of Augsburg, Germany and University of Bergamo, Italy. During the conference, former drafts of the papers included in this special issue were presented. The authors thank all participants and discussants for the fruitful comments provided at the conference, and all reviewers for their support in improving the papers following the first presentation. Michele Meoli and Stefano Paleari acknowledge the support by the Italian Ministry of Education, University, and Research through the PRIN 2015 ‘Comparing Governance Regime Changes in Higher Education’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Erik E. Lehmann is full Professor and holding the Chair of Management and Organization at the University of Augsburg and director of the CisAlpino Institute of Comparative Studies in Europe (CCSE). He previously held positions like exemplary adjunct professor at the Indiana University, Assistant Professor at the University of Konstanz and Associate Director at the Research Department on Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy at the Max Planck Institute. He is Associate Editor for the Small Business Economics and provides referee services to several Journals including Research Policy, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Journal of Business Venturing and the Journal of Technology Transfer. His scientific work was published in several international Journals including Research Policy, Small Business Economics, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Journal of Management & Governance, Schmalenbach Business Review, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization or Journal of Technology Transfer.

Michele Meoli is Associate Professor of Corporate Finance at the Department of Management, Information and Production Management, University of Bergamo, and Deputy Director of the CisAlpino Institute for Comparative Studies in Europe (CCSE), University of Bergamo and University of Augsburg, where he coordinates the Research Group on Higher Education. His research interests include corporate finance, corporate governance, academic entrepreneurship, higher education, and science policy. His recent scientific works appeared in several international journals, including Corporate Governance: An International Review, Economic Modelling, Higher Education, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Technology Transfer, Regional Studies, Small Business Economics and Studies in Higher Education.

Stefano Paleari is Full Professor of Public Management and Finance at the Department of Management, Information and Production Management, University of Bergamo. He was Rector of the University of Bergamo from 2009 to 2015. He was Secretary General of the CRUI (the Italian Council of the Rectors of Italian Universities) from 2011 to 2013, President of the CRUI from 2013 to 2015, Board Member of the EUA (European University Association) from 2013 to 2016. He is President of the CISAlpino Institute for Comparative Studies in Europe (CCSE), a joint research centre of University of Bergamo and University of Augsburg (Germany), where he directs the Research Group on Higher Education (HERE). He is also Scientific Director of the ICCSAI (International Center for Competitiveness Studies in the Aviation Industry) since 2006. His recent scientific works appeared in several international journals, including Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice, European Financial Management, Higher Education, Journal of Air Transport Management, Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Technology Transfer, Journal of Transport Geography, Regional Studies, Small Business Economics, Transport Research Part A: Policy and Practice and Transport Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review.

Sarah A. E. Stockinger she is an external collaborator of the Chair of Management and Organization at the University of Augsburg, and former member of the CisAlpino Institute for Comparative Studies in Europe (CCSE). Her research is focused in the field of Higher Education Governance, Policy effects and Academic Entrepreneurship.

ORCID

Erik E. Lehmann http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4108-7523

Michele Meoli http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9438-0782

Stefano Paleari http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6099-560X

Sarah A. E. Stockinger http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3145-9167