Social innovation has been increasingly regarded as an instrument through which transformative structural change, necessary to address grand societal challenges can be achieved. Social innovations are encouraged by the emergence of innovation systems that support changes not exclusively driven by a techno‐economic rationality. In the context of this special issue, there has been both little understanding of social innovation systems within mainstream innovation ecosystem approaches and little analysis of the roles played by universities in social innovation systems. We here focus on the institutional complexity of universities and their field‐level dynamics as serving as a potential break on the institutionalisation of social innovation. To deepen our understanding of this, we utilise a literature around institutional logics to foreground characteristics of organisational fields with regard to social innovation. Drawing on empirical data gathered in two public universities located in different countries, we show that in one case the potential of social innovation is undermined by two dominant institutional logics, in the other its permeation across the organisational field is seriously challenged by a more powerful dominant logic. The institutional logic approach is useful to highlighting the barriers to building productive innovation ecosystems incorporating social considerations, and helps to explain the persistent difficulties in reframing ecosystems approaches to reflect wider societal dynamics.

Universities have recently been pressurized to go beyond their economic conceptualization of third-mission activities and contribute to solving grand societal challenges in the regions in which they are located. Social entrepreneurship has emerged as one mechanism by which universities can address societal challenges. Despite a growing awareness of universities' potential and expectations to enhance social entrepreneurship in their geographical vicinities, how these processes become legitimized within a higher education context has received surprisingly little attention. This paper, therefore, explores factors affecting the (de)legitimacy process of social entrepreneurship within universities. Using a single case study design that relies on semi-structured interviews carried out in a Dutch public university, it was found that organizational legitimacy of social entrepreneurship remains unestablished. Furthermore, the legitimacy process is affected by (1) the expectations of stakeholders, the difficulty of measuring social impact and third-mission indicators; (2) an overemphasis on high-tech research and application as an organizational identity; (3) the absence of a leader in the field and lack of organizational recognition; and (4) stringent regulations of public institutions in the Netherlands. In addition, enhancing social entrepreneurs is hindered by the lack of place-based belonging among the student body. Consequently, this paper argues that a holistic approach that focuses on the specificities of universities and the increasing competitive environment in which they have come to function, the potential facilitating role of other organizational actors in the field, and designing appropriate policy instruments and incentives would benefit universities in their efforts to enhance social entrepreneurship.

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Rhoda was a RUNIN research fellow at the University of Lincoln and has a PhD on the 'Microfoundations of Academics Networks: Initiation, Evolution and Context'. She also holds a BSc. in Biochemistry from the University of Ghana and an MSc. in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from the University of Oslo. She has industrial experience working as a supply chain quality specialist in Nestle Ghana. She is a visiting researcher at the University of Lincoln's International Business School and currently works as a business development manager at a startup company, Wattero AS in the Oslo area.

Universities are increasingly recognized for playing a proactive role in supporting culture and creativity-led regional development. Meanwhile, they are also expected to distinguish themselves in their core activities via mission differentiation. Often these two demands are pitched against each other while little attention has been paid to the way universities can manage them. Drawing on a case study involving 29 semi-structured interviews carried out with key actors, this article examines the way a public university located in a peripheral region in the Netherlands navigated such a complex institutional environment. The findings suggest that the university formulated a hybrid response strategy, engaging in both institutional demands simultaneously while prioritizing collaboration with cultural and creative industries and talent attraction over other sub-demands. More importantly, the authors demonstrate that organizational identity, which itself is influenced by peripheral characteristics as well as other institutional factors, plays a significant role in the formulation of a hybrid response strategy. They therefore argue that universities’ contribution to culture and creativity-led regional development is not only dependent on their resource capacity – as is often suggested in the literature – but also on how they envision their organizational identity; that is, the type of institutional profiling they want to pursue.