The university's role in sustainable development: Activating entrepreneurial scholars as agents of change

• Published in: Technological forecasting & social change 2019-04, Vol.141, p.195-205
• Main Authors: Wakkee, Ingrid, van der Sijde, Peter, Vaupell, Christiaan, Ghuman, Karminder
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Change agents; College campuses; Colleges & universities; Commercialization; Developing countries; Economic change; Economic development; Entrepreneurial University; Entrepreneurship; Institution building; Institutional change; LDCs; Leadership; Liabilities; Pollution; Poverty; Qualitative research; Regional development; Student participation; Sustainability; Sustainable development; Teaching
• ISSN: 0040-1625; 1873-5509
• DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2018.10.013

The role of (entrepreneurial) universities as change agents in regional economic development has been highlighted previously, but how they can drive regional sustainable development in developing countries has been largely neglected to date. Using qualitative methods and building upon institutional perspectives of sustainable change, we show how being confronted with adverse poverty and pollution in local contexts can drive an entrepreneurial university to develop a sustainability vision that accordingly becomes the driver of institutional change. We demonstrate how local campus leadership, a holistic teaching and research programme, and student involvement can have significant local effects over the short term. However, we also show how liabilities of smallness hinder the creation of significant sustainable local impact. Instead, the campus becomes an incubation space for novel institutional practices for regional development. Indeed, the most promising initiatives return to the original campus for scaling up. This study helps to characterize the entrepreneurial university by first presenting universities as drivers for sustainable change through education and outreach, rather than via traditional commercialization activities and notably in developing countries. Second, the study illustrates the risks and value of creating a separate space for novel concepts for sustainable development to be tested prior to returning these concepts to the principal location. •Personal confrontations with adverse conditions sparked engagement in regional sustainable development by members of an entrepreneurial university•Leadership, the use of narratives and collective action form important means through which an entrepreneurial university achieves sustainable development•The role of student engagement other than through student startups is often overlooked in studies on entrepreneurial universities but in fact students can play a significant role in driving sustainable regional development•Entrepreneurial universities can serve as a place in which new initiatives for sustainable development could be explored in a relatively safe environment without being scrutinized too closely by the directorship of the main campus. The most successful initiatives were then spun back to the main campus.