A Literature Review on Entrepreneurial Universities : An Institutional Approach

is now generally accepted that globalization process and internationalization have modified the roles of main agents of social and economic changes. In this case, Universities have been affected by new responsibilities such as regional economic and social development, the reduction of public funds, and the educational market competence. On this, universities are being required to operate more entrepreneurially, commercializing the outcomes of their research and spinning out new, knowledge-based enterprises. In this context, the main purposeof this paper is to revise the literature about the environmental factors that affect the creation and development of the Entrepreneurial Universities. With this aim the study adopts institutional economic theory, and more specifically the works realized by North (1990, 2005), to focus on the formal and informal factors that facilitate or retard the phenomenon of an entrepreneurial university. The main contribution of this paper could be help design policies that will stimulate the entrepreneurial activity of universities and stimulate, therefore, their contribution to the development of the modern knowledge economy