Role Transitions and Contextualization: The Path of a University of Applied Sciences Towards Entrepreneurship

How do higher education institutions (HEIs) strategically transition entrepreneurship education into their education programs and curricula? This paper studies how becoming an entrepreneurial university unfolds over time as a response to societal and institutional pressures and ambitions of integrating entrepreneurship education into core missions and program activities. Through an in-depth qualitative case study of historical documents and retrospective follow-up timeline interviews, we map the development of events related to curricular and extracurricular entrepreneurship activities over a decade in a Danish university of applied sciences where an entrepreneurial university discourse is present and easily observable. The study demonstrates the variety of strategic initiatives taken under ‘the entrepreneurial university’. Through a theoretical lens of role transitions, we show how curricular and extracurricular educational practices are transformed and contextualized through processes of replication, determination, and exploration to fit, translate, and adjust entrepreneurship education into the setting of the university of applied sciences. The study brings a new perspective and context focussing on universities of applied sciences, indicating a different agenda on entrepreneurship than traditional HEIs. The research shows that the path towards entrepreneurial university (integrating a new institutional role) mainly occurs through role transitions at the individual level (the way teachers/researchers assume new roles).