Calling for student engagement in an entrepreneurial university

Abstract

The stakeholder approach to entrepreneurial universities has raised interest among entrepreneurship scholars and as a result, students are recognized as an important internal stakeholder group within an entrepreneurial university. However, research conducted among university actors tends to focus on the university management or academic staff’s point of view while the students as stakeholders in entrepreneurial universities remain neglected. In this chapter, we discuss why student engagement in entrepreneurial universities should be studied and how it can be studied. We outline new potential topics and methodological approaches on how to study this topic. We argue, that to increase the students’ entrepreneurial engagement more attention could be put on examining different ways to make students’ voices heard in formal university activities and on examining students’ ways to participate in extra-curricular activities. Furthermore, to capture the multidimensional nature of student engagement, multiple ways of studying and assessing student engagement are needed.