Fostering Entrepreneurship: The Role of Education Institutions

Encouraging and supporting innovation and entrepreneurship has been a dilemma for higher education institutions. This is due to a number of challenges such as a mismatch between support provided by the institution and what startups and innovators actually need, or a lack of focus in initiatives and programmes launched. 

The Digital Education Council’s recent Executive Briefing #008, “From Academia to Market: Fostering Entrepreneurship in Higher Education”, provides a guiding framework on how institutions should develop their innovation strategies. We have identified four different innovation profiles to guide institutions to channel their resources to relevant and useful initiatives that help nurture innovation and meet institutional innovation goals.

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Institutions Need to Define Their Innovation Ambitions

To begin shaping an innovation strategy, institutions must first identify what they want to get out of nurturing their innovation ecosystems. They should clearly define their innovation goals: who do they want to be, and what do they want to be doing?

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For example, institutions who aim to maximise financial returns from their innovation ecosystem would fit the profile of a High-Return Innovator, and should be using their ecosystem to identify and prioritise innovations that have the potential to generate high financial returns. 

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Institutions Need to Identify Their Expertise and Strengths 

The next step of an innovation strategy is determining how institutional expertise and strengths can be channelled towards relevant innovation initiatives that are catered to their objectives. Each higher education institution has its unique expertise and strengths  which are influenced by factors such as their human resources, like faculty and students, location, and more. 

These areas of expertise and institutional strengths can help determine how institutions can provide support in their innovation ecosystem. For instance, research-intensive institutions can focus on supporting and developing their licensing and transfer programs to boost commercialisation, while institutions with domain expertise can provide consultancy and advisory services to startups and entrepreneurs operating in their relevant domain.

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Institutions Need to Tailor the Use of Innovation Instruments According to Their Profiles

Lastly, institutions need to understand how they can tailor the use of various innovation instruments to their profiles and objectives. 

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More targeted use of innovation instruments plays to institutional strengths, allowing institutions to utilise their expertise and knowledge to drive innovation, and better meet industry expectations and needs. Institutions need to understand their capabilities and the extent of their resource pool when considering how to use innovation instruments. 

For example, institutions who do not have a developed innovation ecosystem should consider  broad-based incubator programs to encourage innovation in their institutions and community. They can also focus resources on identifying commercially viable intellectual property in the institution, or pledge funding to create internal innovation programmes to further development of their innovation ecosystem. Such institutions would not be suited to utilise consulting as an innovation tool as they likely lack needed experience or expertise in the startup scene. Similarly, they may face difficulties in launching institution spin-outs as they lack the industry know-how and resources to commercialise and publicise their spin-outs and cannot support the spin-outs’ growth and development.

To nurture and develop their  innovation ecosystems, institutions need to be cognisant of their innovation capabilities, expertise and objectives, in order to establish a clear starting point for innovation strategy. From there, institutions can decide how they should utilise innovation instruments like spin-outs, incubators, accelerators and more to support innovations and innovators in their institutions, in a way that leverages institutional strengths while meeting the needs of innovators and entrepreneurs.