Becoming an entrepreneurial university: learning from Stanford’s case

Resumo

Considering the emblematic role of Stanford University in the creation of one of the most innovative regions in the world, alongside the challenges faced by many universities that try to develop entrepreneurially, we aimed at comprehending the development of Stanford’s entrepreneurial turn. Given the historical characteristic of the phenomena, we conducted a qualitative case study based on secondary data from 40 sources, analyzed through content analysis. As a result, we summarized five lessons from the case. Our main theoretical contribution consists on comprehending the universities’ entrepreneurial turn as contingent on institutional work and as a result of regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive pressures emerging from the state, the industry and the universities themselves. University managers and policy makers, interested in comprehending the processes concerning the development of universities and regions entrepreneurially, can benefit from the study.