Exploring the paradigmatic imperative of academic entrepreneurship in the governance of UP Los Baños [College, Laguna, Philippines]

Academic entrepreneurship is a timely theme on public entrepreneurship specially in the 21st century where major changes in the public sector are occurring. This has resulted in a discussion on the new paradigmatic role of universities and a renewed focus on their fourth mission activities (Leiyste et al, undated) after instruction, research and extension. Academic entrepreneurship as defined in this paper takes off from Van der Sidje, 2009, where it is the creation of an environment for active support of knowledge exploitation, stimulation of entrepreneurial behavior among all the members of and institutional structures in the academic community. The paper seeks as a scholarly inquiry to better explain the co-evolution of academic entrepreneurship and institutional environment as part of the governance shift not only in UPLB but also in other publicly funded universities. The paper found out that literature flow on academic entrepreneurship can be summarized from three imperatives - academic entrepreneurship from a classical perspective; academic entrepreneurship from a system perspective and academic entrepreneurship from an attributes perspective. The first imperative of academic entrepreneurship is from the classical perspective of enterprise or business. Academic entrepreneurship from a classical perspective has three major context - one that is largely based on enterprises as a result of technology incubation that were spam out of the research environments (Rowley, 2009), second, when the traditional conduct of basic research was supplemented by applied research (Etkowitz, 1988) responding to demands of industry and business and third, from income generation where the universities become critical institutions responsible also for economic development (Porter, undated). The second imperative understands academic entrepreneurship from a system or process perspective. The system perspective is characterized by an integrated approach to problem solving and opportunity seeking including the involvement of stakeholders in the entrepreneurial process. This is achieved by changing the purpose, incentives, structure, process and culture of the organization to be entrepreneurial. The close links of academic entrepreneurship to new, innovative and path-breaking managerial directions also means improving the university not only in entrepreneurship but in the governance of the university in general. The third imperative of academic entrepreneurship is from an individual attributes perspective. The entrepreneur who is the faculty/scientist applies specialized expertise to solve specific industry-based problems and evidenced by contractual research, technology commercialization, consulting, patenting and external teaching. This involved the faculty/scientist to possess the attributes of innovations, vision building and risk-taking to become entrepreneurs. Four strategies were recommended for the university to be entrepreneurial. Strategy one is shared academic entrepreneurial value in the university. It implies embarking on important effort by rethinking the intersection between society and universities. Universities exist not just for knowledge creation, generation and application but a collective implementation of the three functions which answers societal needs. Strategy two is enhancing the marketing functions of the four identified entrepreneurial offices in the university _ Business Affairs Office (BAO), Office of Institutional Linkages (OIL), Center for Technology Transfer and Entrepreneurship (CITTE) and the UPLB Foundation Incorporated (UPLB FI) and how these offices can be pro-actively engaged in the marketing of university resources particularly the technical expertise. It is suggested that the university create an Entrepreneurial Executive Council (EEC) to provide the integrating mechanisms for all entrepreneurial efforts of UPLB. Strategy three is pursuing innovative administrative process in support of entrepreneurship. There is a need for processes to be simple and communicated for increased awareness for faculty and staff to be motivated to generate and create knowledge. Strategy four is opening new academic markets for UPLB knowledge, products and services. A key strategy is to determine and open markets within a geographical distance where UPLB is not present but has expertise on. This is done with a decentralization context in mind. Finally, the paper argued that the current practice of academic entrepreneurship from a classical perspective will not be successful unless the university system is conducive to entrepreneurship and the faculty and staffs of the university possess the attributes of an entrepreneur.