Title: Entrepreneurial orientation at university: a necessity?

Authors: Sawsen Sidrat

Addresses: Department of Management, Faculty of Economics Sciences and Management of Sfax, Tunisia

Abstract: In this paper, we shed light on the entrepreneurial university in Tunisia. We carried out a quantitative study on 140 Tunisian university officials in order to explore and identify the factors enabling the Tunisian university to become entrepreneurial. Indeed, the practical study has led us to consider the entrepreneurial university as a step towards the evolution of the university. This does not mean that the university will abandon its traditional missions (teaching and research) but it will assume a new mission (entrepreneurship). Our results show that the entrepreneurial orientation at university (innovation, proactivity, autonomy, risk- taking, competitiveness and interdisciplinarity) has a positive impact on the creation and development of an entrepreneurial university. In addition, the hypothetical-inductive approach allowed us to superimpose the theoretical propositions resulting from the literature with the main results of the survey. This has allowed us to refine and enrich the conceptual model by adding a new variable such as interdisciplinarity. The proposed conceptual model can serve as a reference for further research aiming to study the entrepreneurial university.

Keywords: innovation; proactivity; autonomy; risk taking; competitiveness; interdisciplinarity.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEV.2019.098780

International Journal of Entrepreneurial Venturing, 2019 Vol.11 No.2, pp.187 - 206

Received: 01 Jun 2017
Accepted: 20 Dec 2017
Published online: 02 Apr 2019 *

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