The ‘entrepreneurial turn’ and regional economic development mission of universities

In the last 20 years many research universities in the US have added regional business and economic development as a core mission to the traditional ones of instruction and scholarly research. It has been claimed by many critics, however, that this ‘entrepreneurial turn’ presents conflicts with long established academic norms, procedures, and reward systems. This paper utilizes a national survey of faculty attitudes towards academic entrepreneurship to investigate the extent to which the ‘entrepreneurial turn’ has become accepted and taken-for-granted, to identify which academic entrepreneurial activities are deemed appropriate, or legitimate, and those that are widely regarded as inappropriate, and to identify the most salient dimensions by which faculty attitudes vary. The results provide evidence that the entrepreneurial turn within research universities in the US has not yet become ‘taken-for-granted’, that the norm of open science is still widely accepted and conflicts with some academic entrepreneurship activities. There seems to be a broad—though not consensual—agreement on the boundaries of what are deemed appropriate and legitimate entrepreneurial activities that spans disciplines and across prior levels of faculty experience in academic entrepreneurship.