The South African government announcement on revisiting the Policy for the Recognition of Higher Education Institutional Types has caused anxiety and ambivalence among Universities of Technology (UoTs), institutions that lack a solid foundation for conducting leading research. Most underperforming UoTs feared a possible downgrade or…

The literature on entrepreneurial universities has grown exponentially over the past three decades. Concomitantly, the meanings attached to the terminology of entrepreneurial universities has proliferated, creating confusion amongst users. To fill this gap, an inductive analysis of entrepreneurial university conceptualisations from the term's…

Although the diversity of higher education (HE) systems is a widely debated topic in literature, this has been rarely examined considering multiple levels of analysis. This article adopts both a multilevel and longitudinal perspective to study which dimensions of horizontal diversity diversified the English HE system most. Diversity, and how this…

Universities are specific local entities, and as such are in competition with one another for resources and prestige. The general tone of the literature--which sees universities mainly as specific organizations--is quite negative, with competition leading to destructive market and political forces. The tone is surprising, given the extraordinary…

Agreements between national public authorities and higher education institutions serve as a governance instrument in many European countries. In Norway, these agreements are currently undergoing change, as the state now invites the institutions to propose their own goals and parameters in the agreements. This study seeks to understand the…

Higher education institutions (HEIs) often function in an environment where various institutional pressures force them to position themselves on a national-international orientation scale in order to gain legitimacy in the eyes of different constituents with different expectations. Empirical insights, however, on how HEIs respond to these forces…

Competition in higher education is intensifying worldwide and gaining increasing scholarly attention. However, it is not always easy to observe how competition actually takes place. Our research focuses on one example where competition becomes not only visible but also analyzable: State-led funding contests exemplified by the Excellence Initiative…

Student entrepreneurship can take the form of solo or team efforts. While a positive and supportive university context is likely to increase entrepreneurial activities in general, it is unclear whether this effect is equally strong on both forms of entrepreneurship and for all types of students. Focusing on students embedded in universities, we…

To investigate the relationship between Chinese university funding and academic output, we collected data on the scale and the structure of funding and academic output of 36 World-Class universities under construction in China during 2013-21 and 2014-22. Furthermore, we empirically analyzed the effects of funding scale and structure on academic…

The entrepreneurship and higher education literatures suggest that universities cannot generate significant knowledge spillovers unless knowledge creation is followed by knowledge transformation and commercialization. Although several university business models have been proposed in the literature, extant studies assume that the elements required…

Despite recent evidence linking top management power with firm performance, our understanding about the interaction effect between power and personal characteristics of the top manager is still very limited. Building on and extending the Upper Echelons and Power literature, we address the empirical question: How, i.e. UK Vice-Chancellors' (VC)…

The purpose of this study is to understand the reasons why Japanese higher education institutions show a lack of digital marketing activities. Specifically, we focused on the challenges faced by institutions with management and business faculties when implementing digital marketing. To achieve this purpose, the research invited 167 Japanese higher…

With the transition to knowledge-based economies, higher education (HE) has become a driving factor for economic and social development. Alongside high-quality education and excellent research, social responsibility (SR) has become an important aspect of universities' accountability and legitimacy. Considering the growing importance of SR for…

To date, understanding and empirical investigation of the internationalisation processes of university spin-outs (USOs) have been limited. Few studies have explored the role of the specific characteristics of their core technology, in particular their innovativeness, as a determinant of their early internationalisation. This is also an issue which…

Both the managerial literature and policymakers have recently emphasized the potential role of university spin-offs (USOs) as drivers of regional development. Specifically, USOs may support regional development by exploiting the scientific knowledge developed by their parent universities into industrial innovations, thus spreading knowledge…