MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIRMAN

Dear ladies and gentlemen, Many thanks for your interest in ACEEE accreditation! ACEEE was founded with the mission to increase the direct social, economic and environmental impacts that tertiary institutions make in their ecosystems. Our goal is to challenge the status quo in higher education and advocate for moving beyond the so-called third mission of tertiary institutions (an umbrella term for innovation, tertiary institution-business cooperation, civic engagement, outreach, technology transfer etc.), to academic entrepreneurship, so as to make tertiary institutions engines for societal and economic development. We believe that effective quality assurance in entrepreneurship and enterprise education are inevitable to achieve this. Many tertiary institutions, however, realise that merely adding an entrepreneurship centre, an industry liaison office or changing the vision statement is not enough. Rather, a much more transformative approach is needed; one that changes the culture, the mindsets, the values and the overall DNA of institutions. We are moving from education-oriented and research-intensive tertiary institutions towards impact tertiary institutions, with entrepreneurship and enterprise education being the key pillars of this transformation.Academic entrepreneurship, which refers to efforts undertaken by tertiary institutions to promote commercialisation on campus and in surrounding regions of the tertiary institution, has changed dramatically in recent years. Two key consequences of this change are that more stakeholders have become involved in academic entrepreneurship and that tertiary institutions have become more “strategic” in their approach to this activity. We assert that the time is ripe to rethink academic entrepreneurship. Specifically, theoretical and empirical research on academic entrepreneurship needs to take account of these changes, so as to improve the rigor and relevance of its future studies.The debate regarding tertiary institutions and academic entrepreneurship has relied too much on the research- third mission nexus with its narrow focus on tertiary institution-industry links. This has arisen because of the undue narrow emphasis of academic entrepreneurship on the transfer of scientists’ inventions from the laboratory to licenses and start-ups, particularly in relation to formal intellectual property (IP), such as patents and licenses. However, many new opportunities for academic entrepreneurship arise from the development of informal IP, and the creation of new forms of entrepreneurial ventures.Different stakeholders play varied roles in the missions of tertiary institutions (Clark, 1983). More stakeholders have become involved in academic entrepreneurship, including students, a younger generation of faculty and post-doctoral fellows who are more comfortable working with industry than the previous generation, federal agencies that support entrepreneurship programmes (e.g., NDE,SMEDAN in Nigeria, the U.S. government’s SBIR/STTR Programmes), and alumni. Besides, the roles of other stakeholders such as technology managers at tertiary institutions, economic development officials at the tertiary institution and in the region and state, surrogate entrepreneurs, managers of incubators/accelerators and science/research/technology parks, state legislatures, and other bodies that govern tertiary institutions also need to change.