15. Targeting on Innovation: Potentials and Limits of Entrepreneurial Universities

Innovation has become a frequently quoted and lived central missions of universities. This book demonstrates however that the mission is not constant. New challenges and opportunities emerge at different moments in history and there are currently a number of important strategic orientations that universities need to consider and balance. Universities face the challenge to balance their different activities and missions in order to ensure sustainable impact on innovation ecosystems at different levels. The authors argue that entrepreneurial universities as we know them today will change their thinking and activities from being purely demonstrable impact driven towards an activity portfolio approach. The latter considers ongoing institutional and governance change paired with a selected number of activities which provide demonstrable and visible impact but also continuing to invest into the free mind blue sky driven work typical for such institutions. Even beyond this the entrepreneurial university features risk taking by means of a research and innovation friendly internal climate and organization which is driven by rigor but not administration and performance indicators.