The university's role in sustainable development: Activating entrepreneurial scholars as agents of change

Ingrid Wakkee, Peter van der Sijde, Christiaan Vaupell and Karminder Ghuman

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2019, vol. 141, issue C, 195-205

Abstract: The role of (entrepreneurial) universities as change agents in regional economic development has been highlighted previously, but how they can drive regional sustainable development in developing countries has been largely neglected to date. Using qualitative methods and building upon institutional perspectives of sustainable change, we show how being confronted with adverse poverty and pollution in local contexts can drive an entrepreneurial university to develop a sustainability vision that accordingly becomes the driver of institutional change. We demonstrate how local campus leadership, a holistic teaching and research programme, and student involvement can have significant local effects over the short term. However, we also show how liabilities of smallness hinder the creation of significant sustainable local impact. Instead, the campus becomes an incubation space for novel institutional practices for regional development. Indeed, the most promising initiatives return to the original campus for scaling up.

Keywords: Entrepreneurial University; Regional development; Sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162517302494
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:141:y:2019:i:c:p:195-205

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2018.10.013

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().