Entrepreneurial University in Practice: Synthesizing Two Decades of Evidence

Over the last two decades, the entrepreneurial university has been accepted and promoted in policy circles as an ideal for universities to aspire to. Consequently, a second academic revolution is under way, adding an entrepreneurial objective to the education and research missions of the university. However, while previous research has suggested a number of approaches for universities to fulfill this mission, the body of research on the entrepreneurial university has had a limited impact on universities actually becoming more entrepreneurial. On one hand, research on the entrepreneurial university includes an elevated number of conceptual papers that develop models and typologies with no or little empirical content. On the other hand, the empirical research literature on entrepreneurial universities has consisted predominantly of case studies. No aggregation or systematic analysis of the evidence about the entrepreneurial university has thus far been performed. To address these shortcommings, we systematically synthesize two decades of evidence arising from 118 empirical studies. Toward future research, we critically evaluate the state of literature in terms of research progress and develop research continuation paths, both from a methodological and topic point of view.