The Entrepreneurship Movement and the University

C. Sá, A. Kretz

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137401014
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Pequeñas empresas

Entrepreneurship is widely embraced today in political discourse, popular culture, and economic policy prescriptions. Several groups actively promote entrepreneurial thinking and practices in higher education. This book examines how this 'Entrepreneurship Movement' impacts higher education in Canada and the United States.

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The Entrepreneurship Movement

Abstract: Entrepreneurship is widely accepted and even celebrated today in the United States and Canada. Since the 1980s, several economic, political, and social trends have thrust entrepreneurship into the public agenda and into higher education. This chapter provides an overview of how this “entrepreneurship movement” has been able to advance in higher education. In so doing, it frames the greater support for entrepreneurial learning and practice as not driven by financial or market incentives, but rather by pervasive economic, sociocultural and political trends unified in their enthusiasm and support for entrepreneurship. The entrepreneurship movement entails the ideation of entrepreneurship as an intrinsically positive set of ideas and values that can—or should—permeate higher education.

Sá, Creso M. and Andrew J. Kretz. The Entrepreneurship Movement and the University. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137401014.0004.

Entrepreneurship is widely embraced today in several sectors of society. In policy circles, there is great hope that promoting entrepreneurship is a solution for increasing employment and generating economic growth. Political leaders celebrate entrepreneurs for their creativity, talent, work ethic, resourcefulness, and risk-taking spirit.¹ Business writers, for their part, have spawned a whole genre of books on entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, which is not confined to those interested in launching a new business; entrepreneurial ideas are applied to a range of issues, invariably framed as positive guidelines for thought and action.² Within popular culture, entrepreneurs are framed as contemporary heroes. One of 2010’s most successful movies was The Social Network, a story of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation of Facebook.³ The film’s plot would be unconceivable a few decades ago: a college student who devises a social network website out of his dorm room goes on to build one of the largest internet companies in the world. The success of this movie illustrates not only the cultural cache of entrepreneurs, but also the now commonly expected role of universities as sources of entrepreneurial talent and valuable high technology companies.

Indeed, today universities are expected to impart entrepreneurial skills to students, to support the formation of start-up companies, and to work productively with entrepreneurs to commercialize technologies. Moreover, initiatives to create an entrepreneurial mindset among students who may not be interested in launching businesses find support inside and outside higher education. This represents a significant change in the overall sentiment about entrepreneurship. Notwithstanding a few exceptions, the presence of entrepreneurial behaviors within the academy has traditionally been perceived as an intrusion into the scholarly and educational mission of higher education.⁴ Scholars have generally had serious misgivings about commercial undertakings,⁵ and higher education observers routinely cautioned against market-oriented and entrepreneurial values within universities and colleges.⁶ However, the unease that prevailed in the past about the commingling of entrepreneurial and academic activities seems now slightly passé. University spin-offs are commonly portrayed as the prized outcomes of public investments in higher education, and many institutions publicize their efforts at teaching entrepreneurial skills to students. While these changes underscore broad support for entrepreneurial education, some academics remain uncertain about the place of entrepreneurship in the academy,⁷ and not all are convinced that entrepreneurship can even be taught.⁸ Nonetheless, the diffusion of entrepreneurship across colleges and universities represents a growing trend in the United States and Canada,⁹ which has induced changes in educational expectations and practices in higher education.¹⁰ Recognizing the significance of these changes, this book examines how this “entrepreneurship movement” has advanced in institutions of higher education in North America.

The idea of entrepreneurship

Popular conceptions of the entrepreneur tend to follow the iconic image presented by early 20th- century economist Joseph Schumpeter. In Schumpeter’s characterization, entrepreneurs are the agents who create and implement innovations such as new business models, products, and services that lead to “creative destruction,” a process of economic renewal.¹¹ Schumpeter’s work is now as commonly referenced in newspapers and popular magazines as it is in academic journals.¹² That the ideas of an early 20th-century Austrian economist have become mainstream is, in part, testimony to the pervasiveness of the idea of entrepreneurship today.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, one of the largest supporters of entrepreneurship in the United States, captured the prevailing expectations for entrepreneurship in a 2009 report by the Kauffman Panel on Entrepreneurship Curriculum in Higher Education:

Though entrepreneurship can involve—and thus often is mistaken for—invention, creativity, management, starting a small business, or becoming self-employed, it is neither identical with nor reducible to any of them. The defining trait of entrepreneurship is the creation of a novel enterprise that the market is willing to adopt.¹³

Yet, numerous authors have criticized the use of the term entrepreneurship to refer exclusively to firm start-up and business ownership.¹⁴ Some propose that entrepreneurship is about discovering, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities, rather than solely creating a new company.¹⁵ This broader focus has gained traction in several fields where the concept of entrepreneurship is applied to practically any active individual or group in any social context. Employees in existing firms can be “intrapreneurs;” administrators, politicians, or government officials can be “policy entrepreneurs;” artists can be “arts entrepreneurs;” and those involved in not-for-profit organizations can be “social entrepreneurs.”¹⁶ This diffusion of the concept arguably rests on the positive connotations of the idea of entrepreneurship as representing innovation, creativity, self-reliance, and positive-change-making.

This multidisciplinary framing and assimilation of entrepreneurship is directly related to its dissemination across universities and colleges. For instance, writing from a liberal arts perspective, Gatewood and West suggest that an entrepreneur is one “who takes advantage of knowledge and resources to identify and pursue opportunities that initiate change and create value in one’s life and those of others.”¹⁷ By identifying entrepreneurship with proactive, opportunistic behavior that can generate meaningful change, scholars and practitioners across academic disciplines and professions are more commonly able to relate to the entrepreneurship movement.

Trends driving the entrepreneurship movement

The now universal acclaim entrepreneurship receives for its role in spurring innovation, employment, and economic growth is a relatively new phenomenon. Since the 1980s, several economic, political, and social trends have thrust entrepreneurship into the public agenda and into higher education.¹⁸

The first trend relates to the place of entrepreneurs in an increasingly global, knowledge-based economy. Entrepreneurship is now central to current economic development theory,¹⁹ which holds that the continued advance of globalization has shifted the comparative advantage of regions toward knowledge-based economic activity.²⁰ The notion of the global knowledge economy implies that traditional sources of competitiveness, such as low labor costs and favorable tax regimes, have become easily eroded by globalization. As a result, the only durable source of comparative advantage is the ability of firms to continually innovate through new products, services, distribution channels, and business models. Considering their role in bringing new innovations to market, start-ups have become important in this context, making entrepreneurs (particularly highly educated entrepreneurs) central to the mobilization and diffusion of new ideas and technologies. Moreover, large corporations in several industries have increasingly turned to external sources of innovation, including start-up companies and universities, as they seek to be more competitive and retain “leaner” research and development (R&D) laboratories.²¹ Furthermore, in certain industries, such as biotechnology and information and communication technology (ICT), innovations have disproportionally come from start-up companies, often drawing on academic science.²²

The second trend concerns shifts in public policy. Until the late 1980s, the prevailing wisdom was that large firms were responsible for employment growth and technological breakthroughs.²³ Large corporations, such as AT&T in the United States and Bell Canada/Northern Electric in Canada, employed tens of thousands of people and were the primary drivers of technological development. Small- and medium-sized enterprises were generally perceived as too small, vulnerable, and inefficient to successfully compete with larger, more established companies.²⁴ Large corporations were thus the beneficiaries of public policies for economic growth, in which policies sought to improve their efficiency and productivity.²⁵ These perceptions started to change following research findings in the early 1980s demonstrating that small firms generated the majority of new jobs in the US economy.²⁶ A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  The Entrepreneurship Movement
• 2  Entrepreneurship in North America
• 3  Public Policy for Entrepreneurship
• 4  Entrepreneurship Learning on Campus
• 5  Conclusions
• Index