1.3.4.4. The University as Knowledge Entrepreneur
The concept of the university as a knowledge entrepreneur is believed to be instrumental to dealing with a central issue present in the current discourse on university reform. What is the role of the university administration? Furthermore the university as knowledge entrepreneur paradigm can contribute one proposition for the role of the university in the 21st century and its knowledge society.

At the heart of knowledge entrepreneurship is the production of knowledge. It describes the ability to identify and appropriate knowledge and other innovations which lead to a higher performance in knowledge production (i).

Fuller (2006) has described the university as an intrinsically entrepreneurial institution. He laid out a how the university constantly creates and creatively destructs knowledge as a constant circulation. In his view the university creates knowledge through research. In a second step that knowledge is de-constructed through its dissemination to the students and the industry. For him this process is immanently entrepreneurial because some of the students become the researchers of tomorrow, who then develop new knowledge through the creative destruction of the known. Thereby the competitive advantage of that old knowledge is lost and new value has been created in form of the research results. In other words, he depicts a constant creation of human capital (through education) and knowledge capital (through research) which flows towards the third mission and is there invested for the fostering of business, governmental and societal causes. This process has been interpreted and projected onto the three missions of the modern university (Figure 1.7). It became part of the ‘originating theory’.

Figure 1.7 – The University as Knowledge Entrepreneur (Developed from Fuller, 2006)

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(i) in research and teaching.

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