Entrepreneurial education for the entrepreneurial university: a stakeholder perspective

Entrepreneurial universities have gained increasing prominence across the globe and are now engines for regional economic development. While a few, elite universities are successful at developing and exploiting entrepreneurial capital, most universities have achieved only modest results, even after changing organizational structures, incentive systems and strategic priorities. Given this dichotomy, it is time for universities to examine how entrepreneurial education can play a greater role in shaping the entrepreneurial university model to exploit its benefits. We argue that the two institutionalized metrics—number of new firms formed and the amount of licensing revenue—used to evaluate performance of entrepreneurial universities are not easily applicable to science and technology entrepreneurship education. We integrate logic from stakeholder theory to provide a framework for explaining the relationship between entrepreneurship education and the formal and informal processes of technology commercialization within the entrepreneurial university. In addition, we advance a set of questions and performance metrics to evaluate entrepreneurial education initiatives inside of the entrepreneurial university. Thus, our paper includes educational assessment metrics reflecting the needs of a wider variety of stakeholders, including administrators, students, and technology commercialization offices. We conclude with a discussion on the implications for this framework including future research directions.