Entrepreneurial leadership in the academic community: a suggested research agenda

This paper considers the concept and practice of entrepreneurial leadership in the academe. After a small introduction to the research in the emerging field of entrepreneurial leadership, we note many substantial differences between academic entrepreneurs and the general class of entrepreneurs so as to motivate our focus on the academic community. We then provide a brief narrative on some strands of literature on entrepreneurial leadership and give preliminary hints of the difficulties associated with application of the concept and the related research to the academe. That is followed by a more direct consideration of the applicability to the academic community of the concepts, definitions, and research agendas articulated in the existing literature on entrepreneurial leadership. In particular, we note the potential inapplicability of several items in the agenda proposed by Harrison et al. (2015) for "gendered research" on entrepreneurial leadership. In that context, we propose an agenda for research on entrepreneurial leadership in the academic community. The agenda broadly takes the concepts, definitions and practice outlined in the existing research on entrepreneurial leadership and suggests that the applicability, and possible modifications, of these to the academic community be considered in the future research. It is possible that much of the conceptualization and practice of entrepreneurial leadership discussed in the literature has limited applicability to the academe for which new paradigms might be needed.