Does entrepreneurship belong in the academy? Revisiting the idea of the university

ABSTRACT

Academic entrepreneurship is a contentious university activity, but there is little engagement in the relevant literature with the idea of the university itself. References and assumptions about the role of universities in society are barely made explicit even though the centuries-old development of the idea of the university carries great insights. In this paper, we consider some of the deep tensions between instrumentalist and idealist views about the role of universities and argue that there is space for academic entrepreneurship, not merely as an add-on, but as an integral part of university activity. By formulating a research-oriented vision of academic entrepreneurship, we hope to guard the university from the dominance of other interests and goals and thus argue that an attractive form of academic entrepreneurship is possible.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic entrepreneurship
• role of university
• grand societal challenges
• innovation

Introduction

Universities are crucial organisations, but their normative role is under-explored. They bear great responsibility by spearheading research into the unknown, by educating the next generation and by contributing to the development of solutions to societal problems. The notion of the university is old and has a distinguished historical pedigree; it has also changed and adapted in response to internal needs and external pressures. Today, grand challenges require universities to contribute to societal efforts by not only generating research and technology, but by introducing them as solutions in politics, economy and society.

Increasingly, universities do so by engaging in academic entrepreneurship, which are efforts to ‘promote commercialization on campus and in surrounding regions of the university’ (Siegel and Wright 2015, 582).¹ Academic entrepreneurship comprises the transfer of technology in the form of patents and licenses, the creation of spin-off and start-up companies, as well as collaborations with industry to develop new products. There is systemic need for universities to contribute to innovation and entrepreneurship processes. Concepts like National Innovation Systems (Lundvall 2007) or the Triple Helix Innovation Model (Carayannis and Campbell 2009) spell out the idea that innovation is the result not of individual actors, but entire innovation systems. Universities play a prominent role in all these models (Mowery and Sampat 2005) and have been identified as key contributors to regional economic development (Tijssen, Edwards, and Jonkers 2021).

Academic entrepreneurship is part of the third mission of universities to have impact on industry and society (Reymen 2019). The third mission has been defined as ‘activities concerned with the generation, use, application and exploitation of knowledge and other university capabilities outside academic environments’ (Molas-Gallart and Castro-Martínez 2007, 321). These activities are about reaching out beyond the university walls, thus distinguishing them from the more traditional missions research and education.² The third mission contains activities other than academic entrepreneurship: consultancy, community service, policy advice, public lectures and political activism are examples of other third mission activities.

Among the third mission activities, academic entrepreneurship has received the most critical attention. On the one hand, the commercialisation of research and creation of enterprises has been advocated as a way to give back to society and possibly even to boost university funding. On the other hand, critics fear the advent of academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004) with corporate universities dominated by a supply-and-demand market logic and subservient to economic interests. These critics worry that universities, the once protected spaces where open-ended research and higher learning could flourish, are turned into organisations that are merely subsidiary to business interests and the generation of economic growth. The practice of academic entrepreneurship, the critics conclude, is the most glaring subversion of the idea of the university for economic purposes.

The discourse on RRI (Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013; von Schomberg 2013; Owen and Pansera 2019) has been particularly influential in asking normative questions about how innovation should be pursued and which ends it should serve. Given the pivotal role universities play in this discourse (as a site for both research and entrepreneurship), recent studies have analysed the implementation of RRI into organisational practices in research centres. For example, Pansera et al. (2020) trace its impact on public engagement and research in a synthetic biology research centre at the University of Bristol. Likewise, Owen et al. (2021) discuss the barriers and enablers in its institutionalisation in a research funding body, namely the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in the UK.

Despite these analyses of the desirability of academic entrepreneurship and the implementation of responsible innovation in universities, there is little engagement with the idea of the university itself. References and assumptions about the role of universities in society are barely made explicit even though the centuries-old development of the idea of the university carries great insights (Collini 2017). What is the role of academic entrepreneurship in responsible innovation?

In this paper, we consider some of the deep tensions within the idea of the university and argue that there is space for academic entrepreneurship, not merely as an add-on, but as an integral part of university activity. By formulating a research-oriented vision of academic entrepreneurship, we acknowledge that entrepreneurship is a value-laden concept that is strongly associated with ideas about markets and capitalism. Many proponents of academic entrepreneurship start by embracing these without considering the wider political question about the economic regime within which universities operate. As will become clearer in the subsequent sections, we advocate a form of academic entrepreneurship that preserves the entrepreneurial activity, while guarding the university from the dominance of business interests and goals and thus argue that an attractive form of academic entrepreneurship is possible. Of course, the entrepreneurial and economic activities at universities are part of the wider contestation between political economic ideas and the associated questions about the role of innovation, such as a ‘mission economy’ that aims to change capitalism (Mazzucato 2021) against de-growth or post-growth discourses that aim to leave behind market regimes and capitalism (Pansera and Fressoli 2021).

The role of universities in society

The idea of the university has been evolving for centuries and there are at least two strands of thinking about its role that are sometimes in tension with each other. Here we contrast instrumentalist views (universities as instrumental to economic and political goals) with idealist views (universities as places committed to knowledge and education for their own sake, removed from immediate societal concerns). This divergence matters for academic entrepreneurship because idealist views seem to be in tension with such activities. Let us first trace the development of these views.

The instrumentalist views often come under the narrative of a social contract between university and society (Martin 2012). Society grants resources to universities (today in the form of public funding) and in return expects universities to address the societal needs of the day. With the utilitarian social contract of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, new universities were founded to address industrial and societal needs that had been ignored by existing universities. In the UK, University College London (UCL) was founded in 1826 under the influence of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham to produce ‘useful men’, in contrast to Oxford and Cambridge Universities geared towards ‘great men’. In addition to the relevance for teaching and research, this utilitarian need was translated into an imperative for universities to solve technical problems faced by enterprises lacking relevant capabilities.

After World War II, Vannevar Bush’s report ‘Science: The Endless Frontier’ urged to give US American universities the necessary autonomy and funding to carry out basic research, which may be taken up later in the form of applied research for entrepreneurship and societal progress (Bush 1945). The idea was that the basic research carried out at universities will with some necessity contribute to societal purposes, such as economic prosperity and national defense. This idea has received critical attention as the ‘linear model of innovation’ because it assumes that expanding the technological frontier will inevitably bear fruit for public purpose. Subsequent contracts envisioned more specific mechanisms through which university research should benefit society.

The most fully pronounced celebration of universities’ economic utility could be observed in the decades following the 1980s, starting in the US in what has been referred to as the ‘entrepreneurial university’ (Etzkowitz 2003). In 1980, The Bayh Dole Act allowed US American universities to commercialise research that had been conducted with public funding. Stanford and MIT were pioneers in encouraging researchers to look for opportunities to commercialise their research. While previous social contracts were premised on trusts and public funding carrying the bulk of research expenditure, the entrepreneurial university was often combined with the promise that universities can boost their funding by commercialisation.

The last decades have demonstrated the need for a ‘revised social contract’ where ‘publicly funded researchers are expected to address the needs of society more directly’ (Martin 2012, 556). The Responsible Innovation discourse has led this development by discussing the conditions, values and ends that make innovation serve societal interests. In von Schomberg’s (2013) definition of responsible research and innovation he stresses that societal actors become ‘mutually responsive to each other’, not only to ensure the ‘acceptability’ and ‘sustainability’, but also the ‘societal desirability’. Similarly, the framework by Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten (2013, 1572) includes (besides anticipation, reflexivity and inclusion) a ‘responsiveness’ dimension, stating that ‘[r]esponsible innovation requires a capacity to change shape or direction in response to stakeholder and public values and changing circumstances’. Grand societal challenges are today the most prominent way to define societal desirability and the need to change shape and direction of innovation. Yet there are also issues with this instrumentality towards grand challenges within this discourse. For instance, Owen and Pansera (2019, 39) write that the focus on purpose ‘is deeply contested, not least because it, for example, might be seen to challenge the principles both of market governance and scientific autonomy (at least what remains of it)’.

In the last years, the European Union and the United Kingdom have reconceptualised science, technology and innovation policy as ‘mission-oriented’. Basic research and technology may have to be complemented by an involvement in addressing societal challenges and needs that are increasingly defined by political actors. Those innovations are sought out and promoted that promise to help address grand societal challenges, such as climate change (Mazzucato 2018). The implications of such ‘mission-oriented innovation policy’ on universities have not yet been fully explored, but given their integral role within innovation systems, their role is likely to be understood as instrumentally relevant in devising technical and social solutions to these challenges.

What these instrumentalist views share is a picture of universities as contributing to societal or economic goals and hence as fulfilling their share in a social contract. By contrast, another way of thinking about the role of universities often comes under the heading of the idea of the university (several publications in this tradition carry this title, starting with John Henry Newman’s 1852 book [Newman 1947]). We refer to such views here as idealist because they maintain that instrumentalist views threaten to subject the university to foreign purposes that are alien to its own. Collini (2017; ch. 3) traces the evolution of these idealist views over the previous centuries and how they have framed worries about the imposition of external demands on the university.

Collini (2017; ch. 11) characterises the overall vision of the university in the idealist literature as ‘partly-protected space within which trying to extend and deepen human understanding has priority over any other purposes’. Extending and deepening human understanding constitutes an area of human pursuit, and of our social life, that follows its own rules, values and purposes; universities are dedicated to this pursuit.³ While idealist views have been critical of attempts to see universities as merely instrumental to societal goals, their constructive visions diverge. In the following we focus on the contributions of Humboldt, Newman and Veblen to this tradition.

In Germany, the towering figure for the idea of the university was Wilhelm von Humboldt, who initiated the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810 and is seen as the pioneer in conceptualising the modern research university in and beyond Germany. Wissenschaft (science) and Bildung (higher education, individual personal development) are the ‘nature’ and guiding rationales of universities.⁴ In the pursuit of these rationales, Humboldt insisted that universities must carry out both research and education, not just education. Research must be primary and it must be treated as something that ‘has not been and can never be entirely found’ (Humboldt 2019, 3). The life of the researcher is characterised by ‘solitariness and freedom’, the conditions for the leisure necessary for research. The state must provide the necessary resources, but must ‘have a clear sense of the inner nature’ of the university, that is, its scientific life and not its external societal utility.

The discussion of the value of university education has often been focused on rejecting attempts to make education more closely aligned with perceived societal needs. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the most prominent reference point for this tradition is the work of the English cardinal John Henry Newman (Newman 1947). For Newman, the purpose of the university is the attainment of ‘liberal knowledge’. By this term, he does not understand knowledge of liberalism, but rather knowledge that is ‘impregnated by Reason’; not knowledge of individual facts, mechanically derived, but rather holistic understanding (Coady and Miller 1993). Such liberal knowledge, for Newman, has intrinsic value, but also promises to bear ‘tangible fruit’ (see Collini [2012; ch. 2] for a critical discussion of the reception of Newman).

In 1918, the American economist Thorstein Veblen published a book-length critique of what he saw as the increasing dominance of business motives in higher education. He insisted that the work of the academic be guided by ‘idle curiosity’ and not by the ‘instinct of workmanship’. The curiosity ‘is “idle” in the sense that a knowledge of things is sought, apart from any ulterior use of the knowledge so gained. This, of course, does not imply that the knowledge so gained will not be turned to practical account’ (Veblen 2015, 40). For Veblen there is an important distinction between universities and technical and professional schools: ‘In aim and animus the technical and professional schools are “practical” in the most thorough going manner; while the pursuit of knowledge that occupies the scientists and scholars is not “practical” in the slightest degree’ (Veblen 2015, 54).

Veblen accepts that these ‘schools’ may be guided by expediency or civic value, but insists that ‘universities’ committed to open-ended enquiry must remain free from such concerns and not be populated by people oriented towards them. The reason is that these people are

to some extent trained to the conduct of affairs, and so come in for something of that deference that is currently paid to men of affairs, at the same time that this practical training gives them an advantage over their purely academic colleagues, in the greater assurance and adroitness with which they are able to present their contentions. By virtue of this same training, as well as by force of current practical interest, the technologist and the professional man are, like other men of affairs, necessarily and habitually impatient of any scientific or scholarly work that does not obviously lend itself to some practical use. (Veblen 2015, 56–57)

In other words, the addition of practically minded people to universities threatens to change the research orientation of universities. It may endanger the unique circumstances that are needed to encourage free and open-ended enquiry that is not primarily guided by practical or societal concerns.⁵

Table 1 contrasts instrumentalist and idealist views on several dimensions, most importantly their divergent views on institutional rationale, as well as the ramifications on research, education and academic entrepreneurship. In the next section, we will trace the implications of this contrast in the field of academic entrepreneurship.

Table 1. The contrast between instrumentalist and idealist views of universities.

	Instrumentalist views	Idealist views
Institutional rationale	Political or economic	Wissenschaft and Bildung (science and higher education) (Humboldt); education (Newman)
Evaluation	According to societal utility, amenable to quantitative measurement	According to university values, qualitative evaluation
Attitude to societal projects	Involved, at best reflective	Detached, can be critical
Institutional integration	Tighter control, projectification	Autonomy of university, ‘solitariness and freedom’ for researcher (Humboldt)
Research	Concrete research projects, defined by societal needs	Open-ended enquiry guided by ‘idle curiosity’ (Veblen)
Diffusion of research	More direct diffusion, part of research projects	Diffusion through graduates or science communicators
Education	Educating future workforce (‘useful men’) (Bentham)	University education as research apprenticeship (Humboldt) or liberal knowledge (Newman)
Academic entrepreneurship	Dictated by political and societal goals (entrepreneurial university)	As object of scientific understanding, guided by what is possible (as opposed to desirable or profitable)

Academic entrepreneurship and the idea of the university

How does academic entrepreneurship relate to instrumentalist and idealist views about the role of universities in society? It seems that instrumentalist views are likely to celebrate the pursuit of academic entrepreneurship. This is especially true for the entrepreneurial university contract that sees the addition of such activities as the ‘second academic revolution’ (Etzkowitz 2001). On the other hand, for idealist views the picture is more complicated and there are tensions that cannot be reconciled straightforwardly.

The first observation to make here is that academic entrepreneurship does not obviously fall under knowledge-oriented rationales like Wissenschaft and Bildung (Humboldt), liberal knowledge (Newman) or the picture of a partly-protected space to deepen human understanding (Collini). If we accept one of these rationales, then academic entrepreneurship may be an activity that was taken on by some universities even if it does not cohere with the central function of these organisation; like a laboratory that offers tours for visitors, a meteorological observatory that sells merchandise or a school whose premises are used as a polling station.

Such an ‘add-on’ interpretation seems to fit closely with the initial stages in the development of academic entrepreneurship. With the start of the 1980s (after the passing of the Bayh Dole Act), universities have set up technology transfer offices (TTOs) in order to patent and license research that has been conducted within the university. This follows mostly a linear model of innovation: the university produces research and technology and sends it off to the world through one of these transfer offices. Such a mode of commercialisation activities may not fall under the narrow purview of the university, but it also does not seem to be in tension with it. The focus may still be on research and education for its own sake. A small technology transfer office as an add-on institution may not even be noted by most academics. In this view, it constitutes an institution at the boundary of the university that ensures that knowledge generated at the core is translated and transmitted to the rest of society, while leaving the workings of the core generally as it is.

However, the practice of academic entrepreneurship has evolved in the last decades (Siegel and Wright 2015). On the ‘traditional perspective’ (1980s–2000s), technology transfer offices, patent offices and academic spin-offs disseminate knowledge resulting from university research and thus have social and economic impact. By contrast, the last decades have seen a new ‘emerging perspective’ on academic entrepreneurship. Increasingly universities interact with industry and other actors to not just generate new knowledge and inventions, but to transform them into solutions and innovations.⁶ In this way, universities play a much more active role by promoting the development of companies on their campuses through incubators or in the form of student entrepreneurship (Rothaermel, Agung, and Jiang 2007; Etzkowitz, Ranga, and Dzisah 2012; Reichert 2019, 37–50). There is therefore now ‘need to embrace a greater variety in the extent and nature of academic entrepreneurship’ (Siegel and Wright 2015, 584).

This emerging perspective of academic entrepreneurship presents the universities and researchers not just as enablers, but increasingly as agents of change themselves. Far from the picture of a technology transfer office that merely sits at the boundary of the university in order to translate and transmit to the rest of society, academics are much more actively involved in addressing problems directly. Through direct involvement, the needs and concerns from outside the university are likely to interact with the traditional research and education activities, thus creating a two-way lane of interaction with society.

This more direct involvement of academics with the problems to be addressed opens a different way of looking at the tension between idealist views and academic entrepreneurship. Instead of asking whether academic entrepreneurship falls within the proper rationale of universities (or whether it is merely an add-on to its proper tasks), we can ask whether its pursuit may actively undermine the research orientation of its other activities. This question asks whether academic entrepreneurship may introduce, encourage or maintain tendencies that are subversive to the idea of the university. In particular, the worry is not so much that universities overreach by adding non-core activities to their portfolio, but rather that these new activities introduce foreign goals and thus undermine the activities already conducted at universities. This rehearses Veblen’s concern from the previous section that introducing practically minded people will undermine open-ended enquiry. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers notes: ‘[t]he spirit of research and the pragmatic spirit of invention differ essentially’ (Jaspers 1959, 14).

The most forceful arguments of this kind have been advanced as criticisms of academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004; Resnik 2007). These authors argue that commercialisation has significantly undermined the agenda in university research and education in the last decades. In recent discourse, too, these worries have surfaced not only in relation to academic entrepreneurship, but in particular to the recent wave of marketisation of higher education (Halffman and Radder 2015, 172).

In the context of academic entrepreneurship, critics have observed several potentially problematic implications from the introduction of the business motive into the university (cf. Shane 2004: ch. 13). First, scientific research may be oriented not towards what is scientifically relevant, but rather towards a research agenda shaped by corporate interests that exercise direct and indirect influence through funding decisions. Second, there may be pressure on academic subjects – the humanities and social sciences – which have less to offer in the form of commercialisable knowledge. By requiring researchers to fund their research partly through industry collaborations, these academic disciplines may find themselves unable to compete with subjects that are more applicable and translatable into economic gains. Third, if researchers are committed to both generation of knowledge and business ventures, there may be conflicts of interest. Professors may be drawn to divert time to their spinoff company as opposed to their research work. Fourth, this conflict may manifest itself in the unwillingness to share important research results publicly to avoid commercialisation by potential competitors. Fifth, teaching curricula may be influenced by business interests and the interests of industry collaborators. Professors may have little time to spare for student supervision next to their entrepreneurial activities. Sixth, by making universities and researchers more and more dependent on industry funding, their academic freedom may be placed in jeopardy. Universities dependent on collaborations with private sector companies may be restricted in their ability to reflect and criticise dominant powers in society. Finally, academic entrepreneurs may unduly commodify what should be a public good, namely the knowledge generated by publicly-funded research (Radder 2019; Sterckx 2010).

Miller (2019, 1696) presses the tension that universities may find themselves in when he writes that social institutions have ‘constitutive collective ends’ – the production of cars for car manufacturers; research at universities – but market-based institutions have an additional ‘non-constitutive’ end, namely profit maximisation. This means that in the market-based university, ‘there are now two potentially competing collective ends’ (2019). Thus, it may be argued that the adoption of such an additional economic function may slowly undermine the underlying idea of the university. Universities, once committed to research and education for their own sake, may face slow erosion through the introduction of economic motives. Miller (2019, 1685–1686) summarises: ‘competitive markets tend to promote competition at the expense of cooperation, individual and institutional achievement and status at the expense of an overriding commitment to epistemic values, short-term technological breakthroughs at the expense of long-term fundamental research, economically – as opposed to socially – important research, powerful economic interests at the expense of less powerful but more pressing ones, and so on’.

The idea that researchers have a responsibility to commercialise their research findings is also met with ambivalence by researchers themselves. Holloway and Herder (2019) interviewed established and emerging researchers at a Canadian university to understand how researchers in biomedicine see the imperative to commercialisation, especially given that it may be conducive to their academic careers. They found that despite ambivalent and sometimes critical attitudes among these researchers, the pursuit of academic entrepreneurship is reproduced rather than explicitly questioned. One of their interviewees, a full professor, is quoted as saying (Holloway and Herder 2019, 269): ‘I think that the opportunity [to commercialize] should be available. I just don’t think it should be the reason we do what we do’. Another one adds: ‘I’m deeply concerned about the movement, the change in mindset about what’s the role of academic research to commercialization’.

Thus, the idea of academic entrepreneurship often gives rise to worries that university activities may be subverted by economic and business interests. However, we may raise similar worries about political or societal goals going beyond narrowly economic interests. As noted above, the recent shift in European science, technology and innovation policy towards mission-orientation, may encourage research councils to tie research funding closer to the short-term promise of addressing societal challenges. This can be observed by the increasing expectation to complement research funding proposals which a narrative of which societal goals (grand challenges or sustainable development goals) are addressed by one’s research.

These worries – both of an imposition of economic and of political ends on universities – must be taken seriously, especially in light of the wave of market-based reform programmes since the 1980s which have undoubtedly led to excesses in many universities.⁷ Yet we contend that there is a vision for academic entrepreneurship that stays closer to the tradition of the idea of the university. In the next section we start to draw the contours of such a vision.

A vision for academic entrepreneurship

When Humboldt discussed the idea of the university in 1810, he drew a distinction between the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ organisation of universities; in other words, the guiding internal rationale and the external institutional frame of universities (Humboldt 2019). In formulating our vision for academic entrepreneurship compatible with idealist views of the role of universities, we follow his distinction. In this section, we focus on the internal rationale that should be guiding in the pursuit of academic entrepreneurship, while the following section deals with the institutions that are required for and conducive to the type of academic entrepreneurship we wish to advocate.

The basic idea behind our proposal for an idealist vision for academic entrepreneurship is to accept research and higher education as the guiding internal rationale within the university and to understand academic entrepreneurship as a way of pursuing them.⁸ Humboldt accepted both research and education at universities, but insisted that research must be primary and that education can be a useful way of pursuing research. Education aids research because it spurs on the professors and the ‘course of science is evidently quicker and livelier at a university, where it is continuously mulled over in a large number of strong, robust, and youthful minds’ (Humboldt 2019, 5). Can academic entrepreneurship be a similar way to pursue research (and higher education) at universities?

Before we consider academic entrepreneurship more specifically, let us start with the broader set of third mission activities, such as policy advice and academic engagement with industry. Through these engagements researchers are led to engage with real-world problems and the obstacles that exist to tackling them. While in the university environment the parameters and conditions for experimentation can be carefully selected, working in the world beyond the university walls allows less control. Yet these may be crucial inspirations and inputs for the work that is done in universities.⁹ In the last decades, some authors have explored alternative paradigms for knowledge creation that go beyond the standard scientific experimentation-led research aiming for objective and reliable results.¹⁰

These observations about engaging with real-world problems seem to be particularly true for academic entrepreneurship. The researcher develops a ‘proof of concept’ and tries to validate it into the market. In other words, the proof of concept is regarded as something that could potentially be acquired in the market, be made profitable for the seller, or be the trigger for behavioural change in users. It may be a particularly inspiring invention that makes other actors develop similar solutions or adjust their own behaviour towards such a potential future. In this way, academics test solutions that were derived from research in real-life settings and can learn about the strengths, opportunities, but also associated problems. Key data for many types of research may be generated by it.

Academic entrepreneurship may not just be a mode of scientific research in the natural sciences, but may also complement and inform other disciplines, including the social sciences and the humanities. It may be a curiosity-driven pursuit for other faculties in universities; a playground for trying out solutions. Academic entrepreneurship that is mainly informed by natural science and technology studies may primarily take the form of a technology push. New technologies are tried out and the primary goal is to find out whether and in which form they may be part of viable products and practices in society. By contrast, academic entrepreneurship may also be informed by social scientific insights into societal or human needs and may thus help to identify areas of human concern that have been ignored by technology-led entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship may be particularly relevant in these contexts. The driving impetus for such academic entrepreneurship may also be to acquire knowledge how individuals, groups or society react to new things.

Of course, there are important differences between domains and disciplines within the university. Design sciences (Van Burg et al. 2008) are much closer to the type of knowledge production that appreciates close interaction with society and the economy; this contrasts with descriptive or structural science whose aim is to formulate more abstract and general theory (Romme 2003). Similarly, the technological domain will also be a factor in how useful the entrepreneurial initiative of university researchers is for the advancement of the field. In the context of new environmentally-friendly products to change consumer lifestyle, there may be great value in manifold entrepreneurial experimentation. By contrast, in space programmes scientific knowledge is often conducted for a specific circumscribed purpose, with the further use of that knowledge streamlined and potentially guarded by national security interest.

If we accept the Humboldtian claim that universities must engage in holistic higher education of students (Bildung), then there may also be space for student entrepreneurship as part of an idealist conception of the university. In fact, entrepreneurship activities might help give life to education at universities. Some universities adopt novel educational formats, such as challenge-based learning, where stakeholders from outside the university introduce students to real-world challenges (Malmqvist, Rådberg, and Lundqvist 2015; Bombaerts et al. 2022). In this way, university education may play a critical role in bringing together different areas of society (such as politics, economy or science), sensitising students to problems they may not be aware of otherwise (Fuchs and Bombaerts 2022).

This view of academic entrepreneurship implies a unique normative role within the innovation process. In the discussion of the Vannevar Bush contract, we encountered the linear model of innovation. This is a causal theory which describes the process of research being turned into technology and innovation that can be used for economic and societal needs. The clear assumption of this normative model is that such entrepreneurial activities are to be valued for the resulting economic and societal benefits. Science serves as the instrumental source from which new innovations may come. Here, research is carried out for the sake of innovation.

A research-oriented conception of entrepreneurship, however, can also yield a different answer to this for what question. If we are committed to the idea that research must be primary, but also that academic entrepreneurship is a valuable activity (at least sometimes at some universities), then we must conversely also see entrepreneurship as an activity in the service of research. Research is not conducted for innovation, but innovation for research. The carrying out of entrepreneurship is a constitutive or instrumental part of conducting research.

In these respects, academic entrepreneurship differs from other types of entrepreneurship. Consider the recent developments in the field of innovation policy. As part of the mission-oriented innovation policy framework, it has become accepted that public sector actors pursue innovation for political goals, namely in tackling grand societal challenges such as climate change. The rationale underlying such policy is political; as opposed to private enterprises generating innovation typically motivated by the promise of future profits (or shareholder value). While private enterprises engage in entrepreneurship in order to make profits, the state does so in order to tackle political problems. The university, we contend, engages in entrepreneurship on different grounds; on grounds that are neither political nor business-driven, but instead guided by the pursuit of research. Such a research-oriented conception of innovation captures the unique organisational meaning that may be attached to entrepreneurship in the context of universities. Thus, in pursuing such a research-oriented conception of entrepreneurship, universities may differentiate themselves from other actors in the innovation ecosystem.

Different rationales might imply a different kind of entrepreneurship. In particular, the public sector is likely to focus on innovations that are politically desirable, while (technical) universities may primarily be guided by what is technologically possible. Focusing on the possible – as opposed to what is perceived as desirable – may in some cases help stay on the ground of realism (when there is a hype about a promised innovation, but the technological potential is unlikely to fulfil this promise anytime soon). Similarly, private business is likely to focus on innovations that promise economic return, while universities may work on innovative solutions that are feasible but whose potential is still uncertain. A research-oriented conception of entrepreneurship at universities lets them play a distinct and crucial role within innovation systems.

Such a division of labour may also be an important element in understanding the responsibility of academic entrepreneurship in innovation processes. The responsible innovation literature has placed emphasis on the dimension of ‘reflexivity’ on the institutional level which means ‘holding a mirror up to one’s own activities, commitments and assumptions, being aware of the limits of knowledge’ (Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013, 1571). While a high level of such reflexivity may be difficult to exercise within organisations, universities may be ideally placed to be key sites of reflexivity within an innovation system. Imagining such a reflexive role for universities within the innovation process highlights the need for universities to engage in societal reflection and to maintain a distanced and reflective stance towards the motives and framings that guide the entrepreneurial activities in the public and private sector.

If we insist on a research-oriented conception of entrepreneurship at universities, we must also go back to the motives prevalent at university. Recall Veblen’s insistence that work at universities must be driven by idle curiosity, as opposed to the instinct of workmanship. Academic entrepreneurship may also best be guided by idle curiosity. Yet this might cause some to worry that such research-oriented, idle curiosity by researchers makes it more likely that they conduct research and entrepreneurship that is of little societal relevance. If left to their own inclinations, researchers may choose to work on socially irrelevant topics and concepts and may pursue research avenues that promise to promote their careers only.

There are, however, strong replies to this worry of academic drift in the context of academic entrepreneurship. First, the curiosity of researchers will be shaped to a significant degree by what is societally relevant at a given time. Researchers do not live in a vacuum. They care about societal problems and their interest in scientific research will also be mediated by an awareness of the relevance of their disciplines. Second, by advocating that universities remain primarily committed to research in their entrepreneurship, we accept that the state continues to fund specific research or entrepreneurship projects. In this way there will still be significant leeway for public funding to influence the priorities of researchers.

A more ambitious reply to the worry of academic drift is that the societal value of universities lies exactly in not being primarily driven by societal relevance. We must maintain the ‘internal’ rationale of universities, focused on research, and must make a leap of hope that these inner workings of the university will aid society in the pursuit of its missions. In a quote – which we may term Humboldt’s promise – he draws that connection between the internal organisation and the societal usefulness of universities:

The state must […] not make use of its academy as a technical or scientific committee. […] it must not demand from them anything that relates directly and straightforwardly to itself, but must nurse the inner conviction that when they achieve their final purpose, they will also fulfill its purposes, namely from a much more elevated perspective, one from which much more can be brought together and very different forces and levers can be applied than the state is capable of setting into motion. (Humboldt 2019, 4)

In other words, universities may be able to produce the greatest societal usefulness by not being directed to it, but rather by the pursuit of something else, namely research. A useful comparison is the paradox of hedonism in moral philosophy. This is the insight that actively trying to achieve happiness may often not be the best way to achieve happiness. Happiness is an abstract goal and may not be action-guiding in many situations. By instead focusing on intermediary goods, such as personal and professional goals or relationships, people may lead fulfilled and happy lives, without making decisions based on happiness calculations.

Humboldt’s promise in the quote above may be understood as a similar recommendation for universities not to run after the latest call for societal utility and instead focus on research and higher education and trust that in this way they generate societal usefulness. Humboldt’s insistence not to treat universities as technical or scientific committees may thus be in contrast to the ‘responsiveness’ dimension in the RRI framework in Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten (2013), which is the need to respond to the changing values of societal stakeholders. Instead, Humboldt’s promise may give us reason to hope that research-oriented entrepreneurship will make use of ‘very different forces and levers’ than entrepreneurship that is narrowly directed towards economic or societal utility.¹¹ Societal grand challenges, as urgent and time-constrained as they may be, may be best addressed by research institutions carrying out projects whose instrumental value may be hard to predict.¹²

Institutional requirements

While the previous section discussed how research-oriented universities may not only be compatible with but actively encompass academic entrepreneurship, here we discuss the institutional bases for the successful pursuit of such research-oriented entrepreneurship. There is the threat that universities engaging in entrepreneurial activities drift off from research-orientation. Universities wishing to stay true to their organisational rationale will be required to steer the political, societal and economic landscape with a view to maintaining the institutional bases required for their commitment to research. We contend that for universities to successfully exercise the type of research-oriented vision of entrepreneurship sketched in the previous section, they need to have institutional agency.

We may first ask whether it is adequate to identify the university as the proper unit of agency in this context. Different types of agents contribute to academic entrepreneurship, be it individual people, research groups, departments, universities, national or supranational university systems. The definition of academic entrepreneurship quoted at the start focuses on universities, but the university as a collective agent plays a more prominent role in some cases than in others. Some universities (especially small ones) pursue a well-defined and coherent strategy, with particular goals in academic entrepreneurship. Some universities will only play a background role, setting a framework for groups and individuals to carry out less coordinated entrepreneurship. In discussing the institutional bases, therefore, we must remain open to different types of agents being drivers of entrepreneurship at different universities. In the following, we list some of the different institutional conditions for successful agency irrespective of who is the main driver of entrepreneurship.¹³

First, autonomy: Universities require autonomy to make decisions about prioritisation, collaborations and management of entrepreneurship. National and international regulations set the framework within which universities can act. The same applies to the economic background conditions: not all types of projects can be financed in the long run and universities act under economic constraints. However, besides these constraints, there is a need for significant leeway to allow spontaneity and creativity in the activities of universities. Pansera et al. (2020, 390) identify similar tensions in the context of implementing Responsible Innovation practices in a synthetic biology research centre at the University of Bristol: ‘its funding reflected a strong political mandate for synthetic biology to unreflexively and instrumentally drive economic growth within a triple-helix model of innovation, aimed at co-producing impact and economic growth with new knowledge’, while on the other hand it was ‘asked to commit to [responsible innovation] as a process that asks for reflexivity, including on the assumptions and motivations associated with its funding’. Similarly, Owen et al. (2021, 7) identify ‘external political drivers’, such as policy focus on economic growth, as a key barrier for the institutionalisation of responsible innovation practices.

One crucial factor to allow autonomy is therefore stable and unconditional public funding that allows universities to pursue entrepreneurial activities without the need to aim for short-term returns, as well as research funding that is not coupled to industry funding. Giving autonomy to universities is a key factor in countering some of the threats of academic capitalism we surveyed above. The threat that research and teaching agendas are shaped by outside interests can be avoided only if universities have stable financial backing that gives them enough room to resist pressures to re-orient their academic activities. Maintaining universities as independent places where open-ended research in the form of the humanities and social science can flourish and where potentially powerful interests in society are criticised are similarly only possible with secure resources, backed by widespread public appreciation of academic work.

Second, discretion: Researchers and other university staff must be able to exercise significant discretion in how to use their time and expertise. The question how the organisational structure of universities can encourage and hinder the implementation of RRI has been studied by the RRI-Practice project, comparing 24 organisations conducting or funding research in 12 countries. Building on this comparison, Wittrock et al. (2021; ch. 5) analyse universities in terms of Mintzberg’s (1979) concept of ‘professional bureaucracy’: researchers generally have a high degree of discretion (which, however, has come under pressure in recent years due to reforms) allowing for ‘pockets for RRI initiatives to flourish’. However, drawing on the same empirical insights, Owen et al. (2021, 7) point to the role of ‘organisational expectations, incentives and resources’ associated with career progression and hiring decisions in hindering the implementation of responsible innovation practices at universities and a UK research funding body. For a research-oriented vision of universities, researchers’ freedom in the choice and execution of research projects is similarly important to allow the utilisation of their intuitions for what will best advance their respective fields.

A similar argument may be made for the discretion of university staff in academic entrepreneurship. For example, the concept of ‘intrapreneurship’ (Antoncic and Hisrich 2003) highlights that individuals within organisations can engage in entrepreneurial behaviour. One key insight from this literature on intrapreneurship is that organisational characteristics (such as communication, control mechanisms, management support), as well as the values of the organisation, are key determinants for the success of individuals within organisations in engaging in entrepreneurial activities. For example, by avoiding ‘excessive use of formal controls’ (Antoncic and Hisrich 2003, 502) universities may adopt some of these lessons from the intrapreneurship literature.

Third, long-time horizons: the contributions from universities should not be evaluated in short-time horizons. This idea is familiar from its research functions. For example, Jaspers (1959) warned that much knowledge created from universities may only benefit future generations. Dworkin (1985) discusses the normative problems that such long-time horizons create for justifying investing societal resources in arts and sciences. For academic entrepreneurship, too, we must take the lens of a long-time perspective to be able to appreciate the contributions of universities. For example, even failure may have value due to the long-term effects through learning. The scientific value of engaging in academic entrepreneurship may only manifest itself after years (or perhaps even decades). Being able to engage in long-term planning may be a crucial factor for universities to plan for societal purpose, as opposed to expectations of short-term insights.

Fourth, evaluation: quantitative evaluations (citation metrics, numbers of publications or the amount of funding secured) have become the dominant mode of evaluating academic work in recent decades. Critics have rightly pointed out that this may systematically underestimate important work that is less susceptible to quantitative measurement and create perverse incentives (Halffman and Radder 2015). While the trend to ‘metric fixation’ (Muller 2018) is not restricted to universities, it may be particularly harmful thereby replacing other forms of valuing academic work. The value of academic entrepreneurship, too, may be easily susceptible to being measured in terms of income and funding generated, but that may make it more likely to transform it into a business-oriented activity. Hence, there must be accepted standards of and appreciation for qualitative evaluation of the value of academic entrepreneurship for research, education and society.

Of course, translating these abstract institutional blueprints into practice and a concrete local setting requires much more engagement with the university-specific tradition, historical background and political and economic context. We hoped to show that taking the idea of research-oriented entrepreneurship serious also requires us to consider the external institutional requirements in universities and thus may contribute arguments to the debates about university management.

Conclusion

In this article, we aimed to make three points. First, we identified academic entrepreneurship as an emerging set of activities that raise questions about the idea of universities and their role in society. Second, we identified two divergent traditions in thinking about the normative role of universities – instrumentalist and idealist – and articulated some of the worries raised against academic entrepreneurship: that universities become business-like or merely subsidiary to societal goals; that their commitment to research and higher education is undermined; and that ‘idle curiosity’ is driven out as the guiding motive by the ‘instinct of workmanship’. Third, we argued that there is space for a vision of academic entrepreneurship, even within an idealist picture, that does not merely see it as an add-on activity, but as a crucial way in which universities fulfil their core research role in society.

We formulated a research-oriented vision for academic entrepreneurship along with a set of institutional requirements necessary for universities to exercise the required agency. Academic entrepreneurship is an extension of the research and teaching activities committed to the promotion of knowledge and learning. Guided by such an internal vision, universities may act as agents of change, participate in finding and implementing solutions to societal problems and in this way participate in responsible innovation and go beyond disseminating academic knowledge. In this way, we hope to have contributed to an emerging literature in the philosophy, politics and economics of universities, a field that has so far received only limited attention in scholarly discourse.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Horizon 2020 [BoostEuroTeQ, grant number 101035802].

Notes on contributors

Lukas Fuchs

Lukas Fuchs is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Philosophy & Ethics group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e).

Gunter Bombaerts

Gunter Bombaerts is Assistant Professor at the Philosophy & Ethics group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e).

Isabelle Reymen

Isabelle Reymen is Full Professor of Design of Innovation Ecosystems, in the Innovation, Technology Entrepreneurship and Marketing (ITEM) group at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Furthermore, she is Scientific Director of TU/e Innovation Space.

Notes

1 Schumpeter (1934; ch. 2) defines entrepreneurship as the introduction of ‘new combinations’ into the market. Some forms of commercialisation may not be sufficiently new to count as entrepreneurship.

2 Education was the primary function of universities in Europe since the Middle Age through the training of clergy and the transmission of existing knowledge. The idea that research would also be a central function of universities is a much more novel idea. It was only in the 19th century (with the Humboldtian university reforms) that universities were increasingly seen as contributing to research. Recognition of the third mission is thus only the latest step in the evolution of the idea of the university. This narrative of ‘two academic revolutions’ – that research and innovation were added to the original education function – follows Etzkowitz’s (2001).

3 Another way of expressing this idea is to call science (Wissenschaft) a ‘social system’ (Luhmann 1992), a distinct mode of communication in society that is autonomous and self-reproducing.

4 The word ‘Wissenschaft’ is here translated as ‘science’. This term is not meant to refer to the natural sciences only, but should be seen as encompassing the social sciences and humanities as well. The German ‘Wissenschaft’ connotes this inclusivity better than the English ‘science’.

5 Of course, instrumentalist views often give credence to the importance of free enquiry and open-ended research. For example, the Bush report (Bush 1945, 7) deals with universities under the heading ‘freedom of inquiry must be preserved’: ‘[a]s long as they are vigorous and healthy and their scientists are free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, there will be a flow of new scientific knowledge to those who can apply it to practical problems in Government, in industry, or elsewhere’.

6 Perkmann et al. (2013) distinguish between ‘academic engagement’ – where universities collaborate and mostly offer expertise to industry – and ‘commercialisation’.

7 For a review of such worries, see Trencher et al. (2014, 157).

8 Accepting research and higher education as primary at universities does not mean that we propose that these activities are somehow value-neutral and that ethical concerns do not play a further role in scientific research. Moreover, we also do not deny that there are structures of scientific communities, with different members acting on different motives. Politi and Grinbaum’s (2020) identification of four Weberian ‘ideal types’ of researchers (‘Heroic scientists’, ‘Golem-makers’, ‘Prometheans’ and ‘Faustian scientists’) might also apply to academic entrepreneurs.

9 The idea that researchers receive important input for their theories from engagement with the world is not new. The Ancient Greek philosopher Plato, whose school and thinking are usually seen as abstract ivory-tower endeavours, famously advised a Sicilian tyrant to implement his political philosophy – which went fantastically awry – and may have been influenced by these experiences in his works.

10 Action research is a prominent example for such an alternative paradigm of scientific practice (Checkland and Holwell 2007).

11 In economics, Nelson (1959) and Arrow (1962) pioneered the idea that basic research and development is a market failure because investors cannot anticipate whether and how research (for example, in chemistry) will be translatable into new products and profits. Those who generate new knowledge may also not be those who can use it.

12 Rejecting an instrumentalist framework for universities is compatible with the idea that a narrative like grand societal challenges is useful for other reasons. For example, Välikangas (2022) demonstrates how the flexibility of this discourse has allowed university rectorates and project leaders communicate with policy makers, funding agencies and industry.

13 Scholars often warn of a copy-and-paste approach for emulating successful organisations. Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff (2017) discuss university and innovation models as part of travelling ‘imaginaries’ and note the worry of treating innovation as a panacea for all societal problems.