THE UNIVERSITY - AN ENTREPRENEURIAL AND INNOVATIVE HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTION

In its new position of actor, involved in the regional development and the society development, as a whole, the University is characterized by a process of virtuous exchanges with the business environment, capitalizing the available resources in the idea to transform them, through well-defined mechanisms, in outputs to bring added value to the development process. In this regard, the University can be seen as an open system, which interacts with other actors involved in the territorial development. In this system are placed a number of resources that, through clearly defined mechanisms, will be transformed by the University into outputs. The University is an institution, legitimized on cultural foundations, which reacts proactively with solutions and innovations for the future. This work captures business models consecrated in higher education, over the time, and their manifestation tendencies under the "umbrella of economic and educational globalization". The necessity for this research was provided by the collective need, at least at the UE level, geared towards the efficiency and equality of education or training systems, which involves an analysis of educational institutions models. Following the common objectives of the European Union member countries - in terms of best practices exchanges, universities are forced to adapt and demonstrate a strong entrepreneurial and entrepreneurial mobilization capacity. This study is based on varied documentary sources using the results of existing studies both, theoretical and empirical, in the academic entrepreneurship domain based on innovation and try to answer the following questions: What does it mean to be an entrepreneurial / innovative higher education institution? What are the defining characteristics? Are there already entrepreneurial higher education institutions from which lessons can be learnt?