Transforming Turkish universities to entrepreneurial universities for sustainability: From strategy to practice

Abstract

Today, universities are seen as the main actors of technological change, innovation, and social development; this situation causes new roles for universities, as well as forces them to change. At present, universities face very important expectations such as research and entrepreneurial activities by providing the industry-university cooperation along with education and training. In order to manage that transformation, it is seen that the universities across the world evolve to context of entrepreneurial university. Within this general framework, the main objective of this research is to determine where Turkish universities stand on the transformation of entrepreneurial university. In order to achieve this goal, 68 public universities' strategic plans, which are thought to reflect the intentions for the future, were subjected to content analysis. The findings showed that the majority of universities in our country did not have entrepreneurial university features but they have strong intention and desire for a transformation in this direction.