Academic Leadership Strategies of Entrepreneurial University: A Bibliometric Literature Analysis

The purpose of this research is to identify the main strategies through which the university can positively contribute to the development of local and regional entrepreneurship throughout implementing its third mission (TM). In this paper, we approach the third mission (TM) of the university in the sense of its contribution regarding the knowledge transfers towards the community and society. We set out to achieve this general goal by discovering those key elements of academic leadership, related to the third mission, that can exert an influence on the entrepreneurial potential of the university towards regional community (starting from students, alumni, teachers, SMEs, society as a whole). The need for this research comes from the reality that universities are being pushed by educational, social and economic challenges to increasingly strengthen the link between theory and practice even through entrepreneurship. Having the role of trainers for future generations, universities have the chance but also the responsibility not only to encourage young people to embrace entrepreneurship but also to prepare them well. The applied research method is a bibliometric literature analysis and a network analysis by using VOSviewer, a specialized software. This research method enables the visualization of previous research patterns thus the conceptual clusters retrieved from the papers analyzed provide the grounded arguments for our research. In order to extract the necessary information for the purpose of the research, we performed the bibliometric analysis in Scopus database in the period 2015-2020, in order to identify and analyze the current perspectives on the subject presented by other authors. We applied this type of bibliometric literature analysis because it facilitates us to highlight several research directions, namely: which are the most discussed issues related to academic leadership and entrepreneurship, which are the shortcomings in discussions on this topic, which are the connections with practical research or which are the emergent issues on the topic. Based on the results, we reached our own conclusions and proposals regarding the academic leadership in the direction of entrepreneurship. In essence, we believe that the university, throughout its third mission (TM), has the potential to be a powerful engine for entrepreneurship development and we will argue the main approaches identified in this direction. The bibliometric analysis also revealed the gradual evolution of concepts in the analyzed period of time and various connections between the concepts discussed in Scopus database articles. A novel concept approached recently is the 'entrepreneurial ecosystem' which is being connected to the entrepreneurial agenda of universities. The links to this cluster showed that on a long-term strategy, entrepreneurial ecosystems will contribute to advanced entrepreneurial learning and business development especially in emergent economies.