Towards the entrepreneurial university 2.0: Reaffirming the responsibility of universities in the era of accountability

Abstract

Universities have been expected to do more to solve economic and social problems in the knowledge-based society. Many universities have tried to become more entrepreneurial in order to respond to the overloaded demands from external society. However, the notion of entrepreneurial university is still quite vague, and so this paper firstly tries to propose a comprehensive framework describing the entrepreneurial university. Facing the increasing global competition, the national governments have also push universities to do more for the society and to be accountable for their “effectiveness” and “quality”, by using the new public management techniques. However, these managerialism approaches have posed serious challenge for the development of entrepreneurial universities. In order to better balance the expectation for being entrepreneurial from the external industry and society, and the managerialism requirement from the government, this paper proposes to reassert the responsibility of universities in the accountability era, moving towards “Entrepreneurial Universities 2.0”.