Higher education institutions (HEIs) are experiencing a challenging era due to demand–response imbalances. An assumed means of responding to the challenge is through the entrepreneurial university model, which adds a third mission to HEIs: to contribute to economic, technological and social development. Therefore, governments across the globe promote this ideal through system reforms and funding schemes, while HEIs ignite institutional changes. Publications also explore the entrepreneurial university model, although some scholars have criticized the new mission and its implied commercial orientation. However, little is still known about how HEIs are applying the model to become more entrepreneurial. Therefore, this article presents a systematic literature review comprised of a meta-ethnography on the transformation journey of 36 HEIs across 18 countries. The outcome is a four-stage iterative action-framework proposition, suggesting that exogenous and endogenous forces constantly influence HEIs which, in response, ignite experiments, requiring sensitization to be consolidated and later institutionalized, in an endless, long and rather slow process. This article contributes to theory by explaining the metalevel of HEIs’ entrepreneurial pathway process and to practice by providing policymakers and decision makers in HEIs with an analytical framework.

Higher education institutions (HEIs), once considered among society’s most resilient institutions, are facing challenges due to changes in governments’ and society’s expectations of them. Within the sector, there is a global call for new models and practices, requiring HEIs to develop the management capabilities once reserved for businesses. In this sense, they will pave entrepreneurial pathways and contribute to economic, technological and societal developments in their regions, thus adding a third mission (engaging socio-economic needs and market demands) to the traditional two (education and research) and transforming themselves into more entrepreneurial institutions. Dynamic capabilities enable transformation processes by allowing the dynamic sensing and seizing of opportunities and risks and the promotion of iterative change and reconfiguration. Scholars have called on HEIs to develop such dynamic capabilities in order to transform themselves and better respond to their sector’s challenges. Nevertheless, the understanding of how dynamic capabilities might advance HEIs’ third mission is still an underexplored concept, and in this paper, we propose mechanisms that promise to transform dynamic capabilities into third mission advancement. We have developed numerous theoretically grounded hypotheses and tested them with a partial least squares structural equation model into which we funnelled data collected from key decision-makers at German HEIs. The results suggest that dynamic capabilities do indeed influence third mission advancement; however, this relationship is mediated by the role of leadership and organisational agreement on vision and goals.

Recent decades have seen many countries reforming their higher education systems, affecting the mission and governance of higher education institutions (HEIs). HEIs are now expected to produce entrepreneurial capital and to be catalysts for regional economic and societal development, taking on significant roles in entrepreneurial ecosystems. Hence, this article addresses entrepreneurial ecosystem stakeholders’ preoccupation with and interest in the role of HEIs in the future and assesses the opportunities and risks associated with HEIs pursuing entrepreneurial pathways. The authors propose five future scenarios, which they term ‘worldwide’, ‘transdisciplinary’, ‘adaptive learning’, ‘blended’ and ‘ecosystem’. These scenarios demonstrate that internationalization, digital transformation, collaborative networks and co-creation processes are key drivers of the advancement of higher education and provide guidance for HEIs and policymakers on the framing of decision-making agendas related to possible entrepreneurial pathways. Based on experts’ assessments, the authors consider the transdisciplinary and blended scenarios to be the most auspicious.