Obstacles to university–industry cooperation in the domain of entrepreneurship

Abstract

An imperative concerning entrepreneurship education noticeable in the European research sources is fostering cooperation between universities and companies. Coupled with a now widely accepted educational view of entrepreneurship as a practical domain, the task becomes even more relevant, but challenging to accomplish. Despite the recognised importance of cooperation between universities and businesses in our society, the present university-industry environment in Europe is “underdeveloped and highly fragmented”, 40% of academics do not engage in this cooperation at all.

Several sources already attempted to identify these obstacles and provide with suggestions for overcoming them, but none of these sources attempted to look at the problem through the prism of entrepreneurial university. This paper primarily aims to apply the four pillars framework of entrepreneurial university introduced by Etzkowitz and to structure the obstacles to university-industry cooperation according to this framework thus offering a theoretical basis for further empirical research of the problem. Secondly, the paper provides corresponding solutions to overcome the identified obstacles. To achieve the aims set, general scientific research methods, including monographic and logical construction tool, were employed.

The paper suggests the main obstacles to university-industry cooperation are: conservatism and rigidness of the academic system, insufficient communication between the parties and detachment of academia from practice, closed corporate culture of businesses, differing attitude of the parties to knowledge, among others. On the other hand, it appeared that commercialisation of scientific commons endangers future progress of science, academic degrees are losing value because of “academic inflation”, and companies are unwilling to cooperate within industry-based projects initiated by universities as it is unclear how created intellectual property will be divided.

Solutions that might help the universities to overcome the existing obstacles are based on good practice examples – involvement of large companies as intellectual donors, science-to-business marketing, renovation of entrepreneurship curriculum, industry-based projects, incentives for companies and others.

The paper contributes to the use of the entrepreneurial university concept, provides classification of the universityindustry cooperation obstacles with a focus on entrepreneurship education, and can serve as a shortcut to exploration of the topic.