ENTREPRENEURIAL AND INNOVATIVE POTENTIAL OF HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS - THE EXAMPLE OF ESTONIAN UNIVERSITIES

The mission and tasks of universities have changed over the years, and the emergence of a knowledge-based economy has created challenges for the higher education sector as a whole on a global scale. One of challenges is to create value through developing entrepreneurial and innovative potential of universities, i.e. to adopt institutional and structural changes and become entrepreneurial university. Among a plurality of approaches, which distinguish the entrepreneurial characteristics of universities, HEInnovate entrepreneurial university evaluation tool provides a guiding framework of key pillars of individual and organisational capacities required of a university to be entrepreneurial. The HEInnovate framework provides different possibilities for the analysis of the aspects of entrepreneurial characteristics of higher education institutions, but so far the mentioned framework has not received much empirical attention. The aim of the current research is to study entrepreneurial and innovative potential of Estonian universities through analyzing the relevant characteristics of entrepreneurial university supporting entrepreneurial mind-sets and behavior, and relationships between entrepreneurial and innovative capacities. The data was collected in 2016 with an entrepreneurial self-assessment survey that was based on the HEInnovate framework. The study has been supported by the ESF programme "Systemic Development of Entrepreneurship education throughout all educational levels" initiated by the Estonian Ministry of Education. The first part of the analysis concentrated on the assessments on the seven dimensions of entrepreneurial and innovative capacities. The results show that Estonian universities have paid most attention to developing the internationalization and knowledge exchange and collaboration activities. Secondly, multiple regression models are used to study how different entrepreneurial and innovative capacities are related to the HEI's validation of entrepreneurial learning outcomes through the design and implementation of entrepreneurial curriculum. The analysis emphasises the role of informal and formal learning opportunities, regular measurement of entrepreneurial learning and teaching, integration of the results of entrepreneurship research and activities connected with business and external environment stakeholders and investment into staff in supporting the entrepreneurial learning outcomes.