Early this June Anne, Seppo and Matti from the Knowledge Governance team travelled to Stanford University to take part in the second Global Entrepreneurial Universities Metrics (GEUM) workshop hosted on this occasion by the International Triple Helix Institute. The trip was a great opportunity to present our work over the past year and also to meet old friends and build enduring new networks on both sides of the Atlantic.
Knowledge Governance team at Stanford
The Knowlege Governance team presented on the topic: Workability of Entrepreneurial University Indicators – Case Finland. In brief, through our work with the preliminary set of metrics and indicators developed at the Leiden workshop last year, we noted that rather more emphasis should be placed on how entrepreneurial university activity takes place as opposed to relying soley on – very useful but occasionally limiting – quantitative data such as the number of patents awarded.
Numerical indicators are well suited to comparing, for example, efficiency when cases are comparable, but they tend to leave out interesting details that ultimately shape the impact the entrepreneurial university has on its environment. It is important to pay attention to this as identifying what makes a useful and contributing entrepreneurial university is important – not least to us in Turku, where we are building the entrepreneurial university of Finland. It seems clear to us that the quality of the activity is at least as, if not more, important than merely counting events.
All in all this was a useful and informative trip; our contribution of looking for quality in addition to quantity was well recieved as many other approaches to now had taken more conventional numerical approaches. One additional highlight of the workshop was engaging with different contexts and views of the entrepreneurial university ranging from Brazil, to the UK and to Austria.