Academic entrepreneuring as a long-term commitment to regional development

Abstract

ABSTRACT The practice of ‘academic entrepreneuring’ here signifies a scholar’s innovative, integrative and persistent mode of pursuing and integrating a university’s three tasks, those of doing research, teaching students and performing outreach activities. The success of academic entrepreneuring is conditioned by the individual’s and the university’s ability to become recognized as a legitimate and trusted knowledge-creator in the regional context. Building such confidence in turn requires continuous, hands-on and whole-hearted engagement with relevant stakeholders. This calls for the mobilization of embodied practical knowledge that draws upon cognitive, affective as well as connative capabilities. Four consecutive autobiographic projects, each covering two decades or more, are reported and reviewed as instances of academic entrepreneuring. These projects and their different qualitative methodologies and varying researcher identities jointly constitute a scholar’s life-long learning and achievements as an academic entrepreneur, beginning with mainly listening to the field and ending with invasive enactive research.