Efficiency of Entrepreneurial Universities in India: A Data Envelopment Analysis

High expectations are placed on universities to deliver well beyond their traditional outcomes (graduation and research) and support societal outcomes as their third mission and beyond. Yet, we see a dearth of performance measurements and research comparing universities considering the third mission outcomes, particularly around entrepreneurship support. To address this need, we rely on the ambidexterity perspective and use a slack-based data envelopment analysis (DEA) to compare efficiencies of 28 Indian universities in delivering entrepreneurship support alongside their traditional outcomes. The contribution of the study is two-fold. Firstly, we rate and compare the universities and identify the orientations towards particular mission outcomes of graduation, research, and entrepreneurship support. From our analysis, we find that fully efficient universities were only a few and were performing well across all the three outcomes. Secondly, we then use orientation and efficiency as a way to measure extent to which the universities can pursue third mission outcomes given their history. We note a path dependence among private universities that have mostly developed with a graduation orientation, to shift to entrepreneurship support without a research base. The study also comments on improving the existing national university ranking mechanisms that use subjective weights and does not consider the scale and orientation of the universities.