Institutional Pressures, Institutional Work and the Development of Universities’ Entrepreneurial Turn

Abstract

Based on Institutional Theory, in this theoretical essay we aimed to create a model that could explain the development of the entrepreneurial turn of universities. As a result, we suggest the following theoretical proposition: universities’ entrepreneurial turn is contingent on institutional work and may be understood as a result of a confluence of inward and outward forces that are shaped through a historical and recursive interplay between regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive pressures, conjointly derived from each actor of the Triple Helix, that is, the state, the industry - or society in a broader sense - and academia. Our main theoretical contributions consist of : (a) placing the universities’ entrepreneurial turn at the epicenter of all the competing institutional pressures and logic when it comes to innovation creation; (b) characterizing the universities’ entrepreneurial turn as a result of the recursive interplay between regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive pressures, conjointly derived from each actor of the Triple Helix; and (c) stressing the fundamental role of the institutional work performed by institutional entrepreneurs in the process of developing the universities’ entrepreneurial turn.

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