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The Entrepreneurial University's Impact on Regional Socioeconomic Development: The “Alumni Policymaker” Mechanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2023

Robyn Klingler-Vidra*
Affiliation:
King's College London, London, UK
Adam William Chalmers
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
*
Corresponding author: Robyn Klingler-Vidra; Email: Robyn_Klingler.Vidra@kcl.ac.uk
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Abstract

Research has examined the impact of the “entrepreneurial university” on regional socioeconomic development by focusing on the entrepreneurial intentions and performance of alumni, staff, and students. The study of impact, to date, has focused on direct and short-term mechanisms, such as alumni's entrepreneurial activities, faculty spin-outs, and active public engagement with policy agendas. Our point of departure is in conceptualizing and empirically testing a longer-term and more systemic mechanism. We theorize and empirically test how the entrepreneurial university imprints on its graduates, some of whom take on leadership positions in innovation policymaking years later. We test this relationship by employing a text-as-data approach to examine the extent to which innovation policy leaders speak about startup-centric innovation, comparing the media coverage of entrepreneurial university alumni relative to their peers. Our original dataset comprises the 485 individuals who held senior innovation policy positions in East Asia's eleven largest economies from 1998 to 2019, detailing their educational background and media coverage (10,816 documents). We conceptualize the “alumni policymaker” mechanism, which constitutes entrepreneurial university alumni shaping the future of national innovation policy by referring to startup-centric innovation three times more than their peers. Those who completed MBAs at entrepreneurial universities express an even greater preference for startup-centric innovation policy.

Information

Type
Research Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of V.K. Aggarwal
Figure 0

Table 1. Cultural, human, and social capital imprinting on entrepreneurial university students.

Figure 1

Table 2. Summary statistics.

Figure 2

Figure 1. Percentage of degrees obtained at the twenty most-attended universities. Entrepreneurial universities are indicated by dark blue bars. All other universities indicated by light blue bars.

Figure 3

Table 3. Two-stage least squares regression analysis of startup-centric innovation and education

Figure 4

Figure 2. Marginal effects of education on startup-centric innovation references.

Figure 5

Figure 3. Multilevel OLS regression of startup-centric innovation and educational backgrounds with interaction effects.

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Table A1. Innovation agency name (and abbreviation) by country.

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Table A2. List of policy leaders.

Figure 8

Table A3. Example search string.

Figure 9

Table A4. News media sources.

Figure 10

Table A5. Entrepreneurial university list in comparison to US News & World Report 2022 rankings.

Figure 11

Table A6. Multilevel OLS regression (robustness test against main regression models, Table 3 in the main text).

Figure 12

Table A7. Multilevel OLS regression with interaction terms.