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Academic entrepreneurship (re)defined: significance and implications for the scholarship of higher education

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Abstract

Over the past several decades higher education scholars have conducted a significant amount of research aimed at understanding the implications of enhanced interactions between the academy and the private marketplace. Accordingly, a voluminous literature that includes conceptualizations and discussions of academic entrepreneurship has emerged. This paper used content analysis to examine how researchers have conceptualized entrepreneurship in five leading higher education journals. The analysis revealed notable patterns in the application of theoretical and conceptual frameworks of entrepreneurship to higher education phenomena, as well as observable distinctions in how entrepreneurial models are applied in specific organizational, institutional, and geographical contexts. Results suggest that there is a paucity of attention paid to the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of entrepreneurship within higher education scholarship. We introduce a framework for strengthening the application of entrepreneurial models to higher education research that is grounded in the theoretical constructs of entrepreneurship as articulated in the economic and management literatures.

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Notes

  1. In twelve of these 25 articles, the term entrepreneurship appeared only in the references. Nine simply employ once the term entrepreneurship in relation to another aspect of the paper (e.g., “policy-makers are entrepreneurial” (McLendon et al. (2005)). The remaining four do not mention the word entrepreneurship in the text.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Applied and Advanced Studies in Education, Charter College of Education, California State University, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Matthew M. Mars

  2. Center for the Study of Higher Education, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Cecilia Rios-Aguilar

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  1. Matthew M. Mars
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  2. Cecilia Rios-Aguilar
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Correspondence to Matthew M. Mars.

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Mars, M.M., Rios-Aguilar, C. Academic entrepreneurship (re)defined: significance and implications for the scholarship of higher education. High Educ 59, 441–460 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-009-9258-1

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