The entrepreneurial and engaged university: development and validation of a faculty perception scale

Purpose The modern university is increasingly mandated to move beyond its traditional missions and act as a core engine for regional development. This has given rise to the concepts of the “entrepreneurial” and “socially engaged” university. However, existing metrics often focus narrowly on quantitative outputs, failing to capture the underlying institutional culture. This paper addresses this gap by developing and validating a novel instrument to measure the entrepreneurial and engaged university through faculty perceptions. Design/methodology/approach Based on a review of the literature, a perception-based scale was developed. The instrument was then validated using a sample of 186 university professors from various Brazilian higher education institutions. The data were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Findings The analysis validates a seven-dimension model for assessing the entrepreneurial-engaged university. The results indicate that faculty members perceive the entrepreneurial and engagement dimensions of the third mission as a unified construct. Notably, the outreach dimension was consolidated: three constructs initially hypothesized as distinct could not be maintained as separate dimensions because inter-construct correlations of 0.887 and 0.900 exceeded the square roots of their respective average variances extracted. This finding suggests that faculty members do not cognitively distinguish among these aspects of the university's societal engagement. A second-order construct analysis further demonstrates that the seven validated dimensions are viewed by faculty as manifestations of a single, integrated higher-order construct, with all path coefficients positive and statistically significant. This perceptual integration aligns with theoretical arguments regarding the convergence of entrepreneurial and engaged university models and this study contributes a faculty-level analytical perspective to this discourse. Practical implications The validated scale provides university administrators with a diagnostic tool to assess their institution's internal capabilities, identify cultural and procedural bottlenecks and strategically guide investments to foster a more productive entrepreneurial environment. The second-order composite score additionally allows a single summary indicator of the institution's overall entrepreneurial-engaged orientation, complementing the seven-dimension profile. Originality/value This study provides empirical evidence that faculty perceive entrepreneurial and engaged orientations as a single integrated profile, and it delivers the first validated, perception-based scale designed to measure that profile.