Entrepreneurial university: a stakeholder-based conceptualisation of the current state and an agenda for future research

Research on the entrepreneurial university has been receiving increased attention in recent years. The growing literature stock has been leading to a rather unstructured research status quo, characterised by foci on particular elements and actors of the entrepreneurial university. Hence, our paper aims to systematically integrate the fragmented literature on entrepreneurial universities. Relying on the stakeholder theory, our paper provides a stakeholder-based conceptualisation. We identify seven research streams and devised an integrative systematic university-centred view on the entrepreneurial university itself and its core stakeholders within its organisational boundaries and beyond, such as researchers, firms, the economy and society. We illustrate and discuss the findings and conclude with a future research agenda. Due to its systemic nature, our integrative stakeholder-based conceptualisation of the literature on the entrepreneurial university enables the identification of important future research directions that particularly address the linkages between the stakeholder groups and the overall ecosystem.