An Assessment and Planning Methodology for University-Based: Entrepreneurship Ecosystems

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for assessing a university-based entrepreneurship ecosystem, grounded in the identification of major stakeholders, entrepreneurship-related activities directly related to those stakeholders, and with an eye to more comprehensive experiential entrepreneurship education that goes beyond traditional classroom education. The method incorporates specific approaches with each major activity area as well as outcomes, which are then aggregated into overall ecosystem strategy and performance. The paper concludes with an approach to action planning and resource allocation staging for university officials and supporting government bodies.

Keywords

Entrepreneurship ecosystems university entrepreneurship entrepreneurship education university incubators

Introduction

Universities play a foundational role in a local and regional entrepreneurship ecosystem development and are recognised as an important source of new technology and new ventures for local entrepreneurship ecosystems around the world.

Entrepreneurship ecosystem research is generally viewed from a broader lens that spans venture development policies and programmes at the municipal, regional and country levels. At the ecosystem definitional level, Neck, Greene and Brush (2014) and Cohen (2006) specify ecosystems components as including an ‘informal network’, a ‘formal network’, government, policy, professional and support services, a venture capital industry, and a broader local and regional talent pool. Researchers such as Spigel (2017) have posited that entrepreneurial ecosystems have numerous cultural, social and material attributes that provide benefits and resources to entrepreneurs, or, are negative factors impeding new venture creation (such as a culture of risk aversion). Other studies have focused on specific country policies, including the venture investment funds, tax policies and other related initiatives, examining these in countries that include Israel, Ireland, Canada, South Korea, China and elsewhere (Armanios et al., 2017; Doh & Kim, 2014; McCann & Ortega-Argilés, 2016; Senor & Singer, 2011), including several studies that have challenged the impact of such investments in regional economic growth (McCann & Ortega-Argilés, 2016). And there is a substantial body of literature that has focused on the university context itself (DiGregoria & Shane, 2003), including the evolution and effectiveness of entrepreneurship education in the classroom (Aernoudt, 2004; Bae et al., 2014; Fayolle et al., 2006; Kassean et al., 2015; Katz, 2003; Kuratko, 2005; Solomon, 2007), the emergence of university-based incubators (Kim & Jung, 2009; Lasrado et al., 2016; Stal et al., 2016), and technology transfer practices and policies (Allen & O’Shea, 2014; Boh et al., 2016). These three components of classroom education, incubators and technology transfer are important elements in a university-based or specific entrepreneurship ecosystem, as are others that include faculty capabilities and experience, entrepreneurship centres and programme resourcing and venture mentoring.

Within this context of research, however, there does not yet exist a research-based assessment method by which universities can assess their respective ecosystems and plan future ecosystem initiatives in the years ahead. Providing such a method to assess and by which to develop a strategy within a university and its key external stakeholders is the focus and purpose of this paper.

University Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Stakeholders

Designing a granular entrepreneurship ecosystem assessment methodology requires a specific design approach. Given the substantial body of extant entrepreneurship ecosystem research, there are numerous potential variables for studying ecosystem status and growth. To narrow down the list of potential research variables that are most important for university entrepreneurship ecosystem assessment, we decided to:

identify major stakeholders in any robust entrepreneurship ecosystem,

consider foremost those research dimensions most important and meaningful to these stakeholders and then

create a research instrument that contains these selected stakeholder-relevant research variables.

We then organised a pilot study with the United States, Korean and Indian Universities to study their respective entrepreneurship ecosystem developments. With this approach, the assessment methodology was designed from the user’s perspective. Applying user-centred design to the structuring of a research instrument offers the promise of creating an instrument that is not only grounded in the literature but also relevant and useful to practitioners than an instrument based exclusively on past academic literature.

Accordingly, we identified the primary stakeholders in the university-based entrepreneurship ecosystem as (a) the entrepreneurs (who may be undergraduate students, graduate students, research staff, faculty and alumni returning to the university for help starting their companies), (b) teaching faculty, (c) professional staff responsible for venture incubators, (d) venture investors, (e) university leadership and (f) the government policy decision-makers. There are also (g) alumni who might fund entrepreneurship ecosystem activities, as well as (h) corporations that have an appetitive for the technologies developed by the entrepreneurs. As we delve further into a university-based entrepreneurship ecosystem, the definition of actors/stakeholders becomes fine-tuned to this specific context:

Within educational institutions themselves level, we can specify primary stakeholders as the following:

Students: Both at the undergraduate and graduate level, and differentiate by area or field of study as well (business versus engineering vs. science), as well as by focus of activity (e.g., just a student in a class, or leading an entrepreneurship-focused club, or participating in a new venture activity). Increasingly, entrepreneurship is viewed as an interdisciplinary field of study and work, reaching beyond just business school students (Hayter et al., 2017; Henderson & Robertson, 2000).

Faculty: Both those who teach some aspect of an entrepreneurship curriculum or engage in non-classroom experiential activities (such as advising student entrepreneurs or overseeing entrepreneurship clubs). Within faculty, there are research productive or tenure track professors, and then, professors of practice, common to well-established entrepreneurship programmes. Also, in highly active entrepreneurially focused Universities, the teaching of certain aspects of entrepreneurship extends beyond business school faculty, such as new product design and prototyping in Engineering, Life Sciences and Computer Science (Kuratko, 2005).

Alumni: Varying not only by age, discipline-affiliation with the university, but also, and importantly, by entrepreneurial intensity. Alumni can serve a multitude of roles: as entrepreneurs, mentors, venture investors or donors to fund entrepreneurial activities.

Entrepreneurs: The entrepreneurs are those individuals whose companies start in or nearby their respective universities or receive substantial support in the form of mentoring and sometimes money in the start-up process. There is a rich array of research pointing to success factors for university-based entrepreneurs, examining research and innovation culture (O’Shea et al., 2005), educational curriculum and strategy (Etzkowitz et al., 2000), experiential education (Corbett, 2005) and team formation. (Roberts, 1991). Note that the entrepreneurs can be any one of the three stakeholders above, and are therefore a meta-grouping of individual actors. There are also some faculty who take leaves of absence to start a new business (DiGregoria & Shane, 2003).

University administrators: These are the senior officials in an educational institution who establish entrepreneurship policy and allocate resources to effect or implement policy, such as resourcing an Entrepreneurship curriculum, or resourcing new faculty lines dedicated to entrepreneurship teaching and research. Those administrators who tend to have the greatest impact on Entrepreneurship strategy and policy within educational institutions include Presidents, Provosts, Deans (not just Business School Deans) and Entrepreneurship Department Chairs.

University staff: These are professional staff persons who provide a range of services necessary for entrepreneurship activity on campus. The most important of these is Centre Directors or Programme Managers for specific activities within entrepreneurship centres. Many universities, for example, host on-campus venture incubators, which have programme directors to oversee operations. Another important staff role is the head of the University Intellectual Property and/or Technology Transfer department, which in most universities are staffed with several or more individuals tasked with licensing University IP to either existing corporations or start-ups. (Sine et al., 2003).

External to the university (meaning no formal or paid association as an employee or student of the university) but nonetheless primary actors/stakeholders in the entrepreneurial process are the following:

Investors: University start-ups—otherwise referred to as spin-offs—often seek early-stage financing. External investors run the gamut of individual ‘angel’ investors, to angel groups where multiple investors participate in single venture investment, to venture capital firms (Drover et al., 2017; Meyer & Crane, 2013). Crowd-sourced funding is also an increasingly important source for university-based start-ups, particularly those making physical products such as food and computer devices (Kuppuswamy & Bayus, 2018).

Mentors: Experienced mentors are important resources for new ventures, beyond just the advice provided in business matters, but in connecting entrepreneurs with customers, resellers and investors (Krueger et al., 2000; Perren, 2003; St-Jean & Audet, 2012). University mentor networks differentiate by sheer size or number or mentors, paid versus non-paid mentoring, gender diversity (female mentors) and rules of conduct (for example, no equity allowed in mentored ventures).

Corporations and managers: Experiential education—learning by doing—has been shown too beneficial to entrepreneurial outcomes for students with university education, based on studies on the impact of internships in different regional contexts (Dhliwayo, 2008; Fayolle et al., 2006; Solomon, 2007). For this to occur, corporations and managers working the corporations must be willing to hire young students studying entrepreneurship, and business and technology more generally. Increasingly, universities with dedicated entrepreneurship programmes are also trying to establish work internships in venture companies.

Service providers: Service providers are important elements of local university entrepreneurial ecosystems by their assistance, typically pro bono, to new ventures created by students (Lichtenstein et al., 2004). The most typical types are law firms, public relations and marketing firms, and accounting firms (for initial bookkeeping), and computer services hosting firms.

Government policy officials: Governmental stakeholders in the entrepreneurship ecosystem vary widely in terms of their strategies and budgets for supporting different other actors in the ecosystem. There are federal, state and local agencies in different countries, each with its own set of policies and resource-providing programmes. Research on the efficacy of these government grant programmes for venture and job creation is mixed, however (Minniti, 2008). Governments also try to induce entrepreneurship or help growing firms with tax policy. These include investment credits for small businesses and other types of preferential tax treatment, policies which in some countries have been shown to have widespread impact, but rather limited in actual effect (Bruce & Mohsin, 2006). Governments have also sought to create special programmes for foreign nationals or more generally, different areas, to start a company in a particular country or area, all in the effort to attract new talent and new investment capital to their respective regions (Saxenian, 2002; Stangler & Konczal, 2013).

Foundation directors: In many regions, particularly developing economies, non-profit foundations play a major role in implementing government policy, including that in entrepreneurship economic development.

With these stakeholders identified, the authors held conversations with individuals representing each stakeholder group identified above, with the goal of several interviews each in the Boston (United States), Seoul (South Korea) and Vijayawada (Andhra Pradesh, India), the three regions specified in the research grant supporting this paper. These conversations revealed specific dimensions of entrepreneurship learning and activity most relevant to each type of stakeholder. We then operationalised these prioritised dimensions into a series of data-driven (not opinion-based or Likert-scaled) questions within each ecosystem dimension. This mapping of stakeholders to major ecosystem activity set is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Source: The authors.

Ecosystem Assessment Dimensions

Experiential entrepreneurship education is different and shown to be more effective than traditional classroom-only entrepreneurship education. (Corbett, 2005; Mandel & Noyes, 2016). Experiential entrepreneurship education immerses students in the start-up world through a variety of mechanisms, including listening to and conversations with current entrepreneurs, working in paid internships for venture companies, and starting new companies themselves within an on-campus incubator, or helping to manage the incubator itself. Both the classroom and the experiential education model must be captured in a comprehensive university-based entrepreneurship ecosystem method.

As shown earlier, Figure 1 presents the model used as the basis for this ecosystem research methodology. It has five major dimensions: three internal to the university, and two external.

Endogenous ecosystem factors: (a) Classroom education, (b) work internships as part of the educational experience, (c) ‘student engagement’ in the form of student clubs which can be seen as an antecedent to actual venture incubation, (d) venture incubation itself, performed on-campus and (e) university-based mentoring programmes. These meta-groups represent the major types of activities occurring within and around a university-based ecosystem, including courses, student clubs, and events, actual venture creation/incubation, which might also elements of university seed-stage financing in the form of grants for prototyping development and early customer acquisition.

Exogenous ecosystem factors: (a) The local investor community focused on early-stage and growth financing, (b) local non-university venture accelerators, where teams from many different universities as well as local companies, can enter for active assistance in venture development and (c) specific government and foundation-based programmes directly supporting entrepreneurship.

We now proceed to specific assessment dimensions within the framework. Figure 2 allocates these specific dimensions to the major components of our ecosystem assessment model.

Figure 2.

Source: The authors.

Endogenous Ecosystem Assessment Dimensions: Areas University Leadership Can Control

Classroom Education

Entrepreneurship education in the classroom has become standard across most major global regions. There is evidence that such education increases student’s entrepreneurial inclinations (Bae et al., 2014). At the same time, not all entrepreneurship education is effective, and some researchers have found that certain commonly used pedagogies have harmed entrepreneurial intent (Kassean et al., 2015; Piperopoulos & Dimov, 2015). There is a substantial amount of research on the design of entrepreneurship curricula for undergraduates, as well as a smaller, more focused set of writings on courses for on technological entrepreneurship for graduate students (Béchard & Grégoire, 2005; Katz, 2003; Kuratko, 2005; McMullan & Long, 1987; Nichols & Armstrong, 2003; Solomon, 2007). Generally, universities offer Entrepreneurship Majors and Minors (for students not in Business or Management colleges or departments) with standard entrepreneurship courses and electives. The core courses tend to be in market opportunity assessment, entrepreneurial marketing, business planning, small business operations, and venture finance. Electives are found in family firms, social entrepreneurship, and specific technology areas of focus. More recently, ‘design thinking’ has also entered the entrepreneurship curriculum (Linton & Klinton, 2019; Von Kortzfleisch et al., 2013). At the graduate level, there are commonly masters programmes, an entrepreneurship track within the MBA, or shorter form entrepreneurship certificates.

For ecosystem assessment, five major components of classroom education are the following:

Undergraduate entrepreneurship curricula: Including the existence and duration of Majors and Minors, the number of courses and types of courses offered; the number of students both enrolled in majors/minors, or just taking a single course during a specific year, and these numbers as a percentage of the student population. It is also important to assess the pertinence of an entrepreneurship curriculum concerning topics such as design thinking, corporate entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship.

Graduate entrepreneurship curricula and post-launch training: Very similar types of aforementioned assessment elements, replacing Majors and Minors with MBA tracks/electives and dedicated masters programmes. The post-launch skills training comprises supplementary seminars in small business management skills to early-stage companies. The assessment elements here are the existence of such a programme, and the specific educational services offered for non-degree, in a no-cost or small-cost format.

Faculty capabilities: In the entire scope of the business discipline, Entrepreneurship as a dedicated area is relatively new, although progressing rapidly in terms of the number of faculty, the amount of teaching being delivered, and research productivity (Cassia et al., 2014; Finkle, 2006; Kuratko, 2005). Assessment elements include the number of full-time faculty dedicated to Entrepreneurship teaching and research, and the type of faculty (research productive or tenure-track, versus professors or practice); the number of adjunct or part-time faculty; and whether these faculty are housed in a distinct academic unit or department with Entrepreneurship in its name (signalling institutional focus in this area).

Entrepreneurship centre structure and resources: Entrepreneurship centres serve many functions within a university, but one of the most important to set the strategy and acquire resources for entrepreneurship education, both in the classroom and external to it (Finkle et al., 2006). Assessment elements include existence, or not, within the university, the organisation structure and governance, the duration of the Centre director position (such positions often rotate too often to achieve impact, the scope of activity controlled by the Centre, and the scope and depth of resources available to support these activities on an annual basis).

Student engagement: Student engagement and enthusiasm in the area of entrepreneurship have been found an antecedent to actual venture incubation in the university context (Pittaway et al., 2011). This use of the word engagement is specific—not in the classroom, and not necessarily as part of a student venture. It lies in between the classroom and the actual venture activity. For college students, such engagement comes in the form of student clubs and societies, sometimes with specific foci, such as women’s entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, or engineering entrepreneurship. Such organisations have received scant attention in the literature, but our experience is that these are an important component of the experiential university entrepreneurship ecosystem. These student organisations enhance the entrepreneurial milieu within the university, bring alumni and the business community back on campus to interact with students, and become a seeding ground for new ventures. Based on this discussion, the assessment methodology captures the amount of activity in business school-centric entrepreneurship clubs and non-business school-centric clubs. The latter are critically important for interdisciplinary experiential entrepreneurship education and subsequent venturing.

Work Internships

This is an essential part of experiential entrepreneurship education (Dhliwayo, 2008; Fayolle et al., 2006; Solomon, 2007). Here, we can differentiate the typical, more standard type of internship (several months during a summer session, paid or often, not paid) with the more serious form of experiential education generally known as ‘co-op’. Germany has a long history of work apprenticeships in engineering and manufacturing disciplines for young learners (Deissinger, 2015). In a more contemporary context, many schools in the United States feature cooperative education programmes as important elements of their curricula (Linn et al., 2004). For this assessment methodology, we are most interested not just the step-up function of going from short internships to longer duration, paid ‘Co-ops’, but also, those that are specifically focused on work in a start-up or growing venture companies. This too has been recognised as an important part of entrepreneurship education at the collegiate level (Mandel & Noyes, 2016; Scott et al., 2016). The benefit of extended work internships, or Co-ops for students in venture companies, is that it provides direct industry experience, and this experience proves important for start-up success. Based on this discussion, the assessment component for internship programmes needs to examine the nature and intensity of such internships. The methodology tracks the existence of a formal programme, the number of student placements, whether internships are developed specifically within early-stage venture companies, and the specific structure (duration, paid or non-paid), and the support staff required to implement an effective programme.

Venture Incubation

This dimension focuses on on-campus incubators, industry mentors and technology licensing offices (TLOs).

On-campus incubators: Over the past decade, Universities have moved from just offering annual ‘business plan competitions’ for students, alumni and faculty to hosting ‘incubators’ and ‘accelerators’ directly within university facilities, as a distinct, tangible infrastructure asset. In addition to but not necessarily providing temporary workspace, incubators try to arrange industry mentors and business plan training for nascent entrepreneurs. Associated with university-based incubators are prototyping facilities, be they for mechanical-electrical systems, 3D printing for forms and moulds, and wet-lab space for life sciences ventures. Not all incubators are effective (Hewitt-Dundas & Burns, 2016; Stal et al., 2016). A recent study found that the implementation of a university incubator lessened the academic institution’s innovation output in terms of IP and patents produced (Hong & Lu, 2016). The design, principle focus and governance mechanisms of the incubator itself are critically important to incubator outcomes as measured by venture produced, financed and sustained over time (Kim & Jung, 2009). Based on this discussion, the specific assessment elements to be understood with the venture incubation part of the assessment method are the specific processes within the incubator (ad hoc, or a structure learning process), the resources and facilities offered by the incubator, its professional staff; the nature of student participation in the management of the incubator (for experiential learning as well as campus outreach); the type and extent of coaching and mentoring provided through the incubator; the availability and amount of seed funds for various venture activities; and the number and success rates of ventures working through the incubator over time, measured in launches, funds raised and sales achieved.

Mentorship: Leading entrepreneurship universities have developed substantial mentor networks to deploy experienced advisors to specific nascent ventures. Mentorship is vital to well-designed venture launches (St-Jean & Audet, 2012; Sullivan, 2000). It is important to note that while mentoring is considered a free, volunteer service in the United States, Canada and much of Europe, in other countries mentors are paid on an hourly or per meeting basis. In some cases, such as Korea, substantial funds are provided by the government to pay mentors in this manner. Assessment elements for this subsystem of the university ecosystem model include the existence of a formal mentor programme, a systematic process for assigning mentors and tracking effectiveness, the number of active mentors, the types of services or areas of advice provided by mentors, and a dedicated budget allocated for the mentoring programme.

Technology licensing offices: There is an extensive literature on the opportunities, challenges and best practices for commercialising technology from the university’s research laboratories (Allen & O’Shea, 2014; Weckowska et al., 2018). The important consideration here is that there is yet to emerge a single, standardised best practice for licensing a professor’s laboratory technology to him or herself, or their students, for a new venture. Our collective experience includes licensing terms for a little as 2 per cent equity and royalty combined to 40 per cent in a European university, with the current trend being simpler, more entrepreneur-friendly ‘express licensing’ programmes. In practice, graduate students most often are the individuals who spin technology out of a particular laboratory, seeking the start-up experience rather than pursuing a more traditional academic career. Based on this discussion, the specific incubator assessment elements must include the following: samples of the university’s IP licensing agreements, deal structure, negotiation processes (customised for each deal or standardized), activity level of licensing and outcomes in terms of ventures launched with licensed IP and licensing revenue.

Alumni engagement and fund-raising for entrepreneurship: Alumni have been found important stakeholders and participants in the University Entrepreneurship Ecosystem. However, most universities do not structure their alumni’s engagement systematically across the ecosystem, beyond asking for donations (Aernoudt, 2004; Roberts & Eesley, 2011). Alumni are important ecosystem actors in mentoring and providing financial support for on-campus incubators and business plan competitions, particularly in the American educational context. Assessment components for alumni engagement include the number of alumni activities engaged in ecosystem activities, and types of activities in which they are engaged; and the processes and funds raised from alumni to support entrepreneurship on campus. As one begins to examine university environments outside the United States, however, the cultural proclivity to alumni engagement and fundraising for entrepreneurship activities cannot be assumed to be present, particularly in countries where universities tend to be state-funded. A university may have to create its own culture of alumni support for entrepreneurship, and this will take considerable time.

Tracking and reporting of venture activity: Several well-known universities have invested substantial resources into research to study start-ups and economic impact emerging from their institutions (Eesley & Miller, 2018; Roberts & Eesley, 2011). Less common are software systems specifically established within incubators to track the progress of individuals and ventures through the incubator itself, the interactions between the venture and their coaches/mentors, and milestone achievement. For high volume incubators, this type of information is important to not identify the successes but to find those ventures that are not making progress and offering help. The assessment component here comprises the existence of a venture tracking system and the types of data tracked. A comprehensive system will track ventures for performance and progress, for the individual entrepreneurs and the venture itself; for the time entering, proceeding through, and upon exit of the incubator; tracking new products launched, changed in key team members, funds raised, and other key events, such as exits.

Exogenous Ecosystem Factors: Areas University Leadership Cannot Control

There are also many dimensions pertaining to university-originated venturing that a university leadership team cannot directly control, such as the investor community, legal frameworks regarding early-stage firm formation, and government policy at both the local and federal level. A university administrator, while not being able to directly control these elements, must nonetheless understand their state of development and impact on venturing within his or her university, and then engage in public and private forums to help shape policy if the administrator is so inclined.

Investor network: The development of a local investor network surrounding the university is seen as an important, enabling component of the entrepreneurship ecosystem surrounding a university (Wright et al., 2004). There are dozens of specific investor networks developed around Universities and their alumni to provide early-stage finance for new ventures. Some universities invest endowment funds directly into university spin-offs. In emerging economies, there are also regional or countrywide angel networks (such as the TiE Angel group in India), but many universities find access to such groups challenging. Nonetheless, the investment community’s appetite to invest in university-based start-ups has continued to increase over the past decade (Drover et al., 2017). The assessment elements for this component in the model are the presence of either a university or local/regional investor network; the activity level of that network; and the access of first-time entrepreneurs in or around the university to that network. It should be noted that this is a private investor network, as opposed to a government-funded venture capital model, such as that found in South Korea.

External accelerators: These near-campus accelerators are designed to serve multiple Universities as well as the alumni of said universities within a specific region or city. These accelerators become a natural ‘next step’ for ventures emerging from a university. An example of a privately funded accelerator is Techstars (with multiple locations around the world). Other accelerators are funded by federal, state or local government agencies. (Yes! Delftin the Netherlands and Mass Challenge in Boston are two examples.) (Boh et al., 2016; McKenzie, 2017). The assessment methodology tracks the existence, number, amount of grant or equity money provided in the external accelerators adjacent to a university.

Government policies and government or affiliated foundation programmes: Israel, South Korea, Ireland, the Netherlands, China, Jordan and Dubai are federal governments well-known for having made substantial investments in various aspects of regional entrepreneurship ecosystem development (Armanios et al., 2017; Doh & Kim, 2014). It is not clear nor supported by empirical evidence that all of these government investments provide desired returns relative to new venture creation and growth (Lasrado et al., 2016; Minniti, 2008). The assessment of government support for entrepreneurship in the methodology includes the type of support provided to ventures, the amount and duration of that support, and if available, measures of outcomes and efficacy. As mentioned earlier, non-profit foundations are also important stakeholders and must be incorporated into ecosystem research.

Operationalising the Entrepreneurship Ecosystem as a Field Research Instrument

We designed an assessment tool to reflect our research and applied experience developing university-based experiential entrepreneurial ecosystems. It takes the form of a survey, which has 14 parts, each reflecting a component of the research model described above. We start with the Entrepreneurship Centre dimension because our partners in completing this survey have typically been such centres seeking self-improvement and benchmarking for best practices. This dimension and those following it are as follows:

Entrepreneurship centre: The structure, governance, budget and financial solidity of university-wide centres focused on new venture creation by students, staff, faculty and alumni.

Student engagement: In the form of student-led clubs focused on entrepreneurship, with a distinction between business school clubs, and those in other Colleges or disciplines within the university focused on supporting entrepreneurial learning as well as specific ventures.

Undergraduate entrepreneurship curriculum: Examines the Majors, Minors, Interdisciplinary structures in a university, subject depth and breadth, and enrolment intensity and participation rates other Colleges or disciplines.

Graduate entrepreneurship curriculum: Examines MBA, Masters, and Elective programming, subject depth and breadth, enrolment intensity and participation rates across other Colleges or disciplines.

Post-incubator training for business skills: Looks at the educational outreach of the entrepreneurship centre or colleges directly to the local small business community and alumni entrepreneurs of the university, supporting them with workshops or courses, potentially in areas of human resources, financial management and operations.

Entrepreneurship faculty: The number and type of full-time and part-time entrepreneurship faculty (those doing the large majority of their teaching in this field), the background and experience of these faculty either as entrepreneurs, board members or angel investors.

Work internships: Distinguishing between traditional short-term internships, paid or non-paid, and longer duration, higher intensity Co-ops, generally six months in duration, specifically targeting work experiences in venture firms with fewer than 500 employees.

On-campus incubator: The existence of an on-campus venture incubator or accelerator, and then, investigation on a range of issues: student-led or professional-led; activity levels in terms numbers and types of ventures at present and over the past three years; ‘successes’ and level of success for ventures leaving the incubator in terms of money raised, and size of operations; learning processes within the incubator; grants provided by the incubator; incubator staff; annual budget and source of funds; policies with respect to governance, IP, and equity request of ventures.

Commercialising technology from university research laboratories: University process for the licensing of grant-funded IP back to the entrepreneurs, including services provided and deal structures, including equity, royalty and patent cost reimbursement policies; the size of the operation in terms of staff; and success of the operation in terms of patents, licensing revenue and venture spun out of the university specifically using lab IP. Average cycle times are also assessed, with an eye towards the ‘Express’ licensing programmes now being tried at certain universities.

Mentoring: The number of active mentors, if organised into a formal mentor network with specific processes and activities, the specific type of mentoring provide (business, R&D, venture finance), and the staff and budget supporting the programme.

Investor network: Examines the level and type of venture financing received by university-based ventures over the prior three years, programmes and activities to bring investors on campus, and any equity investments made directly by the university into ventures.

Alumni engagement: Examines the nature and intensity of alumni engagement in the university’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, including guest lectures, fund-raising, work internships, mentoring and investment. Assesses the degree to which this is a general alumni engagement activity set versus one focused on entrepreneurship, and the degree of success over recent years if the latter.

Tracking and reporting of venture activity and progress: Examines the presence and design of an information system specifically to track entrepreneurs, ventures, status and progress over time along multiple dimensions, including financing, employment and new products brought to market.

To these endogenous factors, we also developed survey questions that examined exogenous factors, including the intensity of the local venture investment and service provider community supporting new ventures, private or public-funded incubators or accelerators in the same region as the university, networking events and directly supportive government policies and governmental or affiliated foundation-driven programmes in the form of educational initiatives for state-sponsored universities, venture subsidies, grants or co-investments.

Important exogenous factors are part of the country culture itself, which in the case of entrepreneurship includes both obvious and less obvious factors. For example, in India, most universities are non-residential. Students are often bussed to and from campus each day, limiting extracurricular engagement in various students or on-campus incubators to essentially day-light hours. This forces university administrators to try to convert extracurricular initiatives into curricular or for-credit activities, in which case, several years are needed for approval from the state or national-run institutions. Another cultural factor is the relationships between males and females (Noguera et al., 2013), where gender separation might easily lead to gender bias where young women might feel cultural pressure to not take leadership roles in starting new companies. Another similar factor is parental support for entrepreneurship. In certain cultures (such as the United States) there is considerable support; while in others (South Korea, India), less so (Parasuraman et al., 1996). This affects the availability of early-stage venture finance, much of which is ‘friends and family’ sources in different parts of the world.

These exogenous factors, while important for any university president, are not under her/his control, and were therefore not our major focus. However, we did gather data for these questions as an extended component of the research instrument.

The instrument was first developed and tested with academic partners in the state of Andhra Pradesh, with five participating engineering-focused universities. This fieldwork commenced in 2017. The assessment instrument went through several iterations over a year. Then, with funding from the Korean government funding, was further improved and applied to additional universities in the United States and South Korea. We also took pains to gather new data from the early Indian participants for new questions developed during the 2nd phase of the survey development.

The specific data elements for each university surveyed are close to one thousand specific items. In practice, gathering these data required pre-work by entrepreneurship staff at participating universities, at least a full day visit by our research team to the participating university, several days of follow-up gap filling for specific items, and several days of assessment on our part that resulted in a presentations to university leadership on assessment results and recommended improvements.

The vast majority of items within each dimension are based on actual activity levels, resources and venture outcomes. Moreover, universities are at present updating their surveys to review progress and update planning. Also, each dimension has outcomes data, such as the number of students enrolled, their discipline affiliations and the number of ventures created and the amount of venture finance raised by those ventures. In the surveys administered and analysed to date, one can see the relationship between strategies, processes and resources for ecosystem development and student participation and venture creation outcomes.

Two members of the research team always collaborated on scoring survey items. These scores were reviewed with respondents in follow-up meetings to help ensure correct interpretation of data or to request additional data. To develop scores for each component in the assessment framework, our research team created a scoring (from 1 to 5, 5 being best) for each question within each of the 14 dimensions above. The individual item scores are then averaged for the entire dimension, and this average dimension score (for example, an average 2.5 for items in the on-campus incubator dimension) used to develop a strategy and assess yearly improvement. Over time, the scoring will become increasingly normative as the number of university participants increases.

Sample Survey Results: A University in Andhra Pradesh, India

An example of the application of the method is shown and described in the next few pages. The university used as the example is itself not named, but for context, it is a large institution with more than 15,000 students and with a strong emphasis on engineering with multiple campuses not just with Andhra Pradesh but in other parts of India. It sits within the state Andhra Pradesh whose successive governments have realised that both employment and local societal innovation/problem solving should in part come from newly formed ventures from its local universities. As in other countries, private educational institutions tend to have more degrees of freedom to innovate in areas such as entrepreneurship education. In Andhra Pradesh, these are called ‘autonomous’ institutions. The university profiled here attained its autonomous status about 15 years ago and then, university status about a decade ago, allowing it to open multiple campuses across the country.

For this university, and the other four included in the pilot study, government policy and support for entrepreneurship played an important role. Most of the funding for the incubators and related training programmes came from national and state funding sources.

We now turn to the specific example of the application of the methodology to assess the current activity level and guide future recommendations. This university was selected for this description because it is the most advanced in terms of entrepreneurship ecosystems of the five institutions secured for the pilot study. In the case of this university, the chancellor was the direct and primary stakeholder.

Noting that there are 13 distinct dimensions in the assessment, Box 1 shows the actual questions for the undergraduate entrepreneurship education dimension, classroom-based, in terms of entrepreneurship majors, minors, specific courses, major content areas in the courses and student enrolments.

Box 2 shows the on-campus incubator questions. It includes factors such as existence, budget, major learning processes and key events hosted in the incubator, including early-stage grants and services provided to the ventures themselves. Box 2 also has its outcome measures, including ventures launched over specific periods, venture financing and firm survivorship.

Box 1.

3-1 Do you have an undergraduate entrepreneurship major? How many are required entrepreneurship courses? How many electives? Please list the most popular entrepreneurship courses in the major. (Describe) 3-2 Do you have an undergraduate entrepreneurship minor specifically designed for students across the entire university? How is it structured? (Describe) 3-3 Do you have an interdisciplinary entrepreneurship minor where some of the courses are business courses, and others, non-business courses, such as design or engineering? (Describe) 3-4 Do you have different tracks within these programmes such as technology ventures, social entrepreneurship, or family business? 3-5 In total, how many distinct entrepreneurship courses are offered across the different colleges or academic units in your University? 3-6 In total, how many students take an entrepreneurship class in one form or another during the course of the academic year? 3-7 What percentage is this of the total student body? 3-8 What is the breakdown of these students in terms of business school students versus non-business school students? 3-9 What are the five most important entrepreneurship classes in your university (in terms of enrolments)? Please provide titles and brief descriptions. 3-10 Do you have courses that are not traditionally entrepreneurship courses that nonetheless are important for new ventures, such as new product development, the design of engineered systems, or digital media innovation? (Describe) 3-11 Do your business plan writing courses lead to business plans that have a ‘life’ after the course is over? If so, is this systematic, such as moving the best plans into an incubator or sending them to other business plan competitions. (Describe) 3-12 Please provide the URL with a description of undergraduate entrepreneurship course.

Source: The authors.

Box 2. Survey Questions for an On-Campus Incubation System (Dimension 7 of the Framework)

7-1 Do you have a student start-up incubator programme on campus? What is its operating budget? 7-2 Does the student start-up incubator have a physical space, or is it just a programme activity? If there is a dedicated student meeting space, please describe it. 7-3 Please provide a list of all the services provided by the student start-up incubator? 7-4 How long has it operated? 7-5 Provide the incubator programme’s URL. 7-6 How do student ventures gain access to the on-campus start-up incubator programme (e.g., competition, merit-based process)? (Describe) 7-7 Is the incubator open to just students, or alumni? 7-8 What is the breakdown of these seed grants by UG, Grad, alum and ‘other’? (Describe) 7-9 What actual ventures has the on-campus student start-up incubator produced over the past five years? 7-10 Do you have a professional staff person overseeing the operations of the on campus student start-up incubator, or, do faculty members run it as a part-time service? Who pays for the professional staff? 7-11 Do you have easily accessible resources on campus that students can use to prototype their new products or systems? (Describe) 7-12 Are awards/grants provided to student ventures on a regular basis? (Describe) 7-13 What is the structure of these awards or grants? (Describe) 7-14 What is the purpose of these grants (prototyping, customer research, customer acquisition or general purpose)? (Describe) 7-15 Does funding come in the form of a single annual business plan competition or an ongoing, continuous programme? (Describe) 7-16 How much of the funding is given out each year in total? 7-17 Who makes the funding/grant decisions? 7-18 Can students receive multiple rounds of incubator grants? 7-19 How many of the ventures receive awards or grants each year? Has this grown in number over the past three years? 7-20 Do students, faculty or a combination of both manage the incubator programme? How many of each group is involved? (Describe) 7-21 Is there an outside Advisory Board? Who sits on it? How often does it meet? (Describe) 7-22 How are business or management school faculty primarily involved in the Incubator’s activity? List the specific activity areas. 7-23 Is there faculty other than business or management school faculty supporting this incubator? If so, in what capacity? (Describe) 7-24 Is there a structured process for venture incubation? Does it have a merit-based progression? If so, how and when do these reviews occur? (Describe) If there is a process diagram of the incubator workflow, get a copy of it. 7-25 Do you have hackathon in different places across campus? Are these hackathons connected back into new venture development in the incubator? (Describe) 7-26 What courses or seminars does the incubator provide outside formal classroom education? Who provides these seminars? 7-27 Who does the incubator use to provide coaching to specific student ventures? Who tend to be the coaches? (Undergrad students, graduate students, faculty, industry professionals, alumni) (Describe) 7-28 How many coaches are active at the present time? 7-29 Is the on-campus incubator just within the University, or does it serve a broader region and multiple Universities? 7-30 Does the university take stock ownership in ventures, and if so, for what and how? (Technology licensing by a venture, stock in return for grants or seed money, other) What is the general level of university stock ownership in ventures? (Describe) 7-31 How many active ventures are there? 7-32 How many ventures have been through the incubator over the past five years? 7-33 How many ventures have launched a funded, ‘real’ business in the past three years? (Raised more than $200K in funding or have more than $1M in annual revenue?) 7-34 How many other ventures that don’t require external funding but are revenue-generating have been launched in the past three years? 7-35 How many of these ventures are still in business? 7-36 How much money, in total, have these ventures raised? 7-37 Can you provide a brief description of your four or five most successful ventures?

Source: The authors.

Table 1 shows the overall results based on our two-person assessment of this particular university (two of our four authors always teamed up to perform the scorings). The scoring themselves was relative to levels of capabilities in each of the dimensions currently found in leading entrepreneurship programmes in the United States. The major findings in Table 1 are as follows:

The university has a well-established entrepreneurship centre that runs a variety of programmes, but lacked dedicated resources and focus.

On the classroom education front, this university has no formal entrepreneurship learning programme at either the undergraduate or graduate level. It has several popular electives, however, with substantial student enrolment. Note, however, that from an experiential perspective, this university had a strong work internship programme, with nearly all students working in summer internships with local companies.

This university’s strength is its on-campus incubator relative to the other Indian and South Korean pilot study members. The incubator produces many new ventures each year. At the time of this writing, it has 20 active ventures. Even then, the incubator has its deficiencies, including insufficient levels of early-stage grants or gap funding to support prototype development and market tests. The incubator also lacked a structured process for venture development that each venture could use for solution design, business modelling and financial projections and other aspects of business planning. In sum, the incubator is a collaborative workspace, with some mentoring at the R&D level, but not much else.

Rounding out the assessment in the university’s process for technology licensing, alumni engagement and mentoring are weak and together with entrepreneurship curricula, make for clear areas for improvement.

Table 1.

Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Assessment for an Indian University

Ecosystem Dimension	02/10/18
1 Entrepreneurship centre organisation, and governance	4
2 Student engagement in entrepreneurship outside of classroom	3.5
3 Undergraduate entrepreneurship curriculum (as designed for the SMBA grant)	2.5
4 Graduate entrepreneurship curriculum	2.5
5 Faculty capabilities for classroom education	2
6 Work-internship design and intensity for experiential learning	4
7 On-campus student start up incubator organization and activity	4
8 Post incubator skills training	1
9 Technology commercialisation (IP)	1.5
10 Mentor programmes	2
11 Venture development activity tracking and reporting systems	1
Average Endogenous Dimensions	2.55
12 Investor network	2.5
13 Alumni engagement for mentoring and fund-raising	2.5
14 Broader government and business community ecosystem effectiveness	1.5
Average Exogenous Dimensions	2.17
Overall Average	2.47

Source: The authors

From these and other dimensions of the survey data, we were then able to develop a report for the Entrepreneurship Centre Director and the university’s senior leadership team that showed assessment scores and recommended action steps for each entrepreneurship ecosystem dimension, and then prioritise these based on our own judgment in terms of implementation stage or timing. This ecosystem improvement strategy, building on the findings from the survey, is shown in Table 2. This figure is the consolidated output of the assessment methodology.

Table 2.

Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Improvement Strategy for an Indian University

Ecosystem Dimension	Action Steps	Phase
Entrepreneurship centre organisation, and governance	The centre hosts many incubation activities but does not have dedicated staff. Needs one or more dedicated staff, an external industry advisory board, and aggressively raise more funds.	1
Student engagement	Expand student club activities, including a regular Speaker’s Series featuring alums and local entrepreneurs.	1
Undergraduate entrepreneurship curriculum	Two existing, popular electives. Now is the time to add several more courses: Design/Innovation, and Business Planning/Venture Finance are the two most obvious additions.	1
Graduate entrepreneurship curriculum	Similar to the situation above for undergraduate. Two popular electives. Build. Platform on the undergraduate curriculum.	2
Faculty capabilities for classroom education	There are just two entrepreneurship-focused faculty. Serving many students already. Need to get several additional faculty lines, including professors of practice with actual venture experience.	1
Work-internships	A strong work internship programme exists. Can begin to push this in a more focused way to technology companies, with some early-stage firms in the mix.	2
On-campus student start-up incubator	A good incubation programme, with reasonably good results in terms of interesting product concepts. But the business end of the planning is weak. Create systematic structure/routines. Also, work to secure more grant funding to help ventures test ideas and launch. Leverage external best practices.	1
Commercialisation technology from the labs	A programme exists, but it is not delivering much in terms of licensing revenue of assisting new ventures. This needs a more integrative, proactive approach reaching into the engineering and science labs.	2
Post-incubator skills training	Develop skill training programs in practical skills area for growing a small business: finance, HR, Ops.	3
Mentor programmes	Very little structured mentor programming as of yet. Leverage external best practices for mentoring.	2
Venture development activity tracking and reporting systems	The school does not have a system of this sort. Needs to build one to keep track of ventures, entrepreneurs; mentors/alumni; financing and other noteworthy events.	2
Alumni engagement for mentoring and fundraising	Create a more structured alumni engagement programme for entrepreneurial alumni. Integrate with the Mentoring programme.	2
Post-incubator skills training	Develop skill training programmes in practical skills area for growing a small business: finance, HR, Ops.	3
Investor network	The school is already reaching out to angel investors. Needs to scale this up and assign a centre staff member to lead the effort.	2
Local venture accelerators	This concept does not yet exist in Vijayawada. Perhaps this university’s incubator can transform into a larger accelerator over time and will draw in a larger pool of possible ventures given than funding comes with actual venture launches.	3
Broader government and business community ecosystems support	This is an ongoing, continuous effort by the government, both short-term and longer-term. AP is making a big investment in ecosystem development, but policies can always change with elected officials.	1–3

Source: The authors.

Stage 1: 1st Year

Stage 2: 2nd Year

Stage 3: Year 3 and beyond

For this Indian university, the focus of these recommendations was (a) improve the incubator with specific business model, channel design and business planning capabilities, (b) design a formal entrepreneurship curriculum as a platform that could be shared with both undergraduate and graduate students and (c) rework and improve the mentoring programme. At present, the mentors were engineering-focused; the teams themselves also needed business mentors. The last column in Table 2 is labelled ‘Phase’. This provides our collective recommendation on which areas should be improved first and those next.

Each university in the pilot has its own story to tell in terms of what occurs post-assessment in the form of tangible improvements. With 13 dimensions, each one the focus of potential improvement, university administrators must prioritise the work, not based just on the study results, but also, the political and funding realities facing their respective institutions. In the Indian university described here, the indicated improvements were difficult to implement in the year following our study. Its Entrepreneurship Centre was poorly resourced and inadequately funded. It did not have full-time dedicated staff and there was no systematic business planning process. At a higher level, entrepreneurship itself had many owners at the university but no central owner, making coordinated, focused efforts difficult. The Chancellor used this study plus other inputs to apply for a large national grant focused on university-incubator implementation, and that year, his university was recently selected as a recipient. Interestingly, the structure of the grant reimburses the university for its incubator operating expenses only based on outcomes, for example, the number of ventures launched and sustained. The potential funding is substantial but must be ‘earned’. The Chancellor began working with external partners to implement a more structured, proven business planning and mentoring process, with the associated learning programmes for students, venture coaches and external mentors. He is also transforming the Entrepreneurship centre from having no single dedicated person to three full-time staff persons. And perhaps most important, he has taken it upon himself to be the ‘owner’ and champion of entrepreneurship across the university’s various campuses.

Discussion and Future Direction

We conducted this assessment in a pilot form in the United States and South Korea, as well as India. Our future research is to expand the sample and to initiate comparisons by dimension across countries/cultures. For example, it is already clear that in India, entrepreneurship education is focused on product or systems development courses and extracurricular activities focused on solving societal and social problems in the local community. With a clear emphasis on product development, the Indian institutions lacked substantive programmes for actual venture development based on these technologies. This assessment methodology should also serve as the basis for ongoing self-assessment and programme improvement by the participating institutions.

There are many areas of future research. The impact of cultural differences is already clear for university entrepreneurship in our participating institutions. Factors such as gender, residential versus non-residential and parental encouragement deserve more careful study. Also, faculty hiring policies as they relate to entrepreneurship education are striking different and deserve further attention. The Indian participants wish to hire only PhD qualified faculty, so that even in a large faculty, one is hard-pressed to find the types of professors of practices so common to leading entrepreneurship programmes in the United States. A third area of study is the closeness and importance of university–industry partnerships for work internships as part of experiential education. In just our current sample, the United States and Indian universities each had strong internship programmes (including in small, medium-sized businesses), while the Korean universities lacked such programmes. One could posit that this might affect not only industry learning but a bright student’s willingness to start or work in a small company as opposed to always seek employment in a chaebol. Essential skill gaps as related to successful entrepreneurship outcomes is another area for research. The major knowledge gap among STEM students in all three venues—the United States, Korea and India—was financial acumen and translating that acumen into business models and plans for venture finance. In the assessment survey, we capture the course topics and can, therefore, look for the inclusion of these topics and eventual outcomes. The assessment methodology as a whole lends itself strongly for a study of best practices in all thirteen dimensions of the instrument.

The assessment methodology reported in these pages was a pilot study. There is quite a bit more information than one need to build a complete implementation plan for a university-based entrepreneurship ecosystem. These data include and public sources funding for ecosystem activities, the size and the willingness of academic units and faculty to participate in hands-on venture development activities, and the capacity and facility by technology from academic research laboratories can be used as the foundation for new ventures. Many of these data are gathered in the survey instrument and can be integrated into a strategy by knowing hands. More importantly, all the data in the survey dimensions are the basis for interesting conversations with major stakeholders on ecosystem design and improvement, the purpose of the method presented here.

Methodologically, up until this point in time, all dimensions have been treated as equal, for example, undergraduate entrepreneurship education factors as equal to graduate education factors, or on-campus incubation programmes equal to classroom entrepreneurship education generally, or mentor programmes the same as work internships, alumni engagement and so forth. As the database grows, one can consider weighting certain dimensions as more important than others, such as the intensity of an on-campus venture incubation system relative to simply tracking venture progress and entrepreneur success over time. At present, we chose not to make this type of value judgment. All are important; nor do we have the data yet to suggest which are more important than others.

As noted at the beginning of these pages, we did not dive deeply into those ecosystem factors external to a university, even though such factors can have a profound impact on a university’s entrepreneurship efforts. We reason that in the main, these ecosystem factors are outside a university’s control. A university might have a weak curricular and incubation process yet be surrounded by a powerful regional ecosystem that helps make its alumni successful entrepreneurs. However, our initial studies have shown that to achieve systematic success in the form of creating high impact, growing ventures from within the university, leadership must work diligently to build its entrepreneurship ecosystem and that this ecosystem must feature entrepreneurship education programmes, process-driven venture incubation and networking services to local investors.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This paper is based on work funded by the Korean Institute for Startup Enterprise Development (KISED) and Seoul National University of Science and Technology to formalise an assessment methodology and apply it to a pilot sample of universities in the United States, Korea and India (Andhra Pradesh). The assessment survey is available for non-commercial use to interested readers employed by an educational institution or government ministry.

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