Indexing third stream activities in UK universities: exploring the entrepreneurial/enterprising university

Abstract

Third Stream Activity (TSA) is increasingly important to UK Universities and the wider economy, through innovation and entrepreneurship. Using data from the 2009/10 UK Higher Education Business and Community Interaction Survey (HE-BCIS) this study investigates UK universities' TSA. Through considering the data in original and logged forms, two interpretations of TSA are investigated, in relation to entrepreneurial and enterprising university concepts. Using Principle Component Analysis (PCA) on both data forms, four factors relating to universities' TSA are identified. A nascent indexing approach is employed to create sub-indexes using the identified factors, weight aggregated to produce final TSA indexes (one for each form of the data). Comparisons are then made between the ranking of universities using the two versions of TSA index, and sub-indexes, illustrating differences utilising entrepreneurial and enterprising university concepts. Important questions are raised for future government policy in terms of promoting interventions that drive towards different TSA types.

Entrepreneurial university strategies in the UK context: towards a research agenda

“…The most obvious, and traditional, is in the form of a ranking of University KE Activity with SMEs, based on the PROMETHEE analysis itself, illustrated in the table below which, for reasons of brevity, shows the first 30 universities in the index. This ranking generates an order consistent with alternative rankings (albeit in slightly different contexts using different methods) conducted by, for example,Fuller et al (2017). However,…”

“…For example, compared with the approach of Hewitt-Dundas (2012) it can be seen that whilst, as expected, there is a concentration of the old research intensive HRIs from the Russell Group in the IPERF cluster (with ten of the fifteen universities coming from the Russell Group), there are another seven in the more widely focused BF grouping (of the total of twelve), four in the TRF group and three in the cluster that would be characterised as Weak External Entrepreneurial Income (WEEI) generating in terms of their activities with SMEs. In comparison with Fuller et al (2017), the index of overall rankings are strongly correlated, both with the entrepreneurial university index (0.67) and even more so the enterprising university index (0.71). This lends support to the approach used in this study in that it is consistent with previous studies using different techniques, is most strongly related to a broader measure of enterprise supporting activities, but also is able to provide additional information in relation to different strategic foci that underlie the rankings.…”

“…This essentially dichotomous approach has also been adopted in more recent work. Fuller et al, (2017), for example, constructed indexes based on universities existing along (indexed) continuums in terms of the extent to which they can be seen as more entrepreneurial (as defined by focus on a narrower range of activities, more likely primarily for their own benefit) or enterprising (more broadly and balanced in their focus in activities that both benefit themselves but also the economy more widely).…”

“…Even where multiple KE activities have been analysed together, as in Fuller et al, (2017) this has concentrated on the overall resultant index score and university ranking, rather than analysing the range of ways similar rankings may be achieved by different universities.…”

“…We focus specifically on universities' KE activities with SMEs because we believe it to be a better Entrepreneurial University focused measure of the strategic choices of universities generally than KE activities overall. It simultaneously captures Etzkowitz et al's (2000) definition of university activities that simultaneously improve university and regional or national economic performance, whilst also broadly fitting many aspects of the "enterprising university" definition described in Fuller et al, (2017). Another reason to focus on SMEs is that the majority of English universities having established infrastructure to provide support for SMEs (HE-BCI report 2017), implying their extent of engagement with SMEs are more likely to be a function of their strategic decisions.…”