The Concept of the Entrepreneurial University Applied to Universities of Technology in Austria: Already Reality or a Vision of the Future?

Autor: Christiana Müller, Martin Sperrer, Julia Soos
Rok vydání: 2016
Předmět:
Zdroj: Technology Innovation Management Review. 6:37-44
ISSN: 1927-0321
DOI: 10.22215/timreview/1026
Popis: The idea of launching a startup company has surely crossed every person's mind at least once: becoming an entrepreneur promises personal fulfillment, interesting challenges, as well as financial success... if you are lucky. In Austria alone, 37,120 startup companies were founded in the year 2014 (BMWFM, 2015). Although this number seems to be high, the entrepreneurial activity in Austria is still low compared to “entrepreneurial countries” such as the United States (Singer et al., 2014). Especially from technical degree programs, only very few alumni decide to become entrepreneurs. This might be due to the lack of programs in the field of entrepreneurial education. The European Commission (2008), however, claims that it is technical and creative students that would benefit most from an entrepreneurial education. The European Commission goes even one step further and states that most of the innovative and useable ideas are coming from non-business studies (European Commission, 2008). In order to foster innovation and entrepreneurship across Europe, they created the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) in 2008. Within knowledge and innovation communities (KICs), the EIT brings together diverse partners (e.g., universities, research labs, companies) to develop innovative products and services, found companies, and so on (EIT, 2016). The universities of the TU Austria (tuaustria.ac.at/en/) participated in this initiative and were either coordinating a knowledge and innovation community or were partners in one. For example, TU Graz was coordinating a knowledge and innovation community focusing on sustainable energy and climate change mitigation, whereas both TU Wien and Montan University Leoben were partners in one focusing on raw materials. Another valuable network is the Conference of European Schools for Advanced Engineering Education and Research (CESAER; cesaer.org) – a nonprofit association of leading European universities with the goal to foster excellence in engineering education and research and innovations through close cooperations with industry. The concept of the "entrepreneurial university" is now recognized as a major driver for self-development and innovation and as an appropriate response to succeeding in highly turbulent and unpredictable markets. This article outlines and evaluates the current implementation of this concept at the universities of technology (TU) in Austria. First, to evaluate the status quo, a review of existing programs and initiatives was undertaken at the three universities comprising the "TU Austria": TU Graz, TU Wien (Vienna), and MU Leoben. Second, a questionnaire was designed on the basis of the HEInnovate framework and sent to representatives of the three universities and resulted in responses from TU Graz and TU Wien. The results underscore that the model of the entrepreneurial university represents the next step of development in higher education. Moreover, it demonstrates that there is still room for improvement at the TU Austria, especially in terms of fostering an entrepreneurial spirit among students. The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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