In the recent past, universities in the western world have been expected to play a greater role in the national economic welfare of their countries in addition to their traditional role of education and research. In 1997, following the examples of national governments in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, the German government launched an entrepreneurship initiative at universities. Two of its goals were entrepreneurial teaching and culture. I decided to explore how universities participated in, implemented and evaluated the public initiative to introduce entrepreneurship into German universities.

During interviews with senior academic administrators at 22 tertiary institutions, I collected data on leadership, organisational re-design and development, recipients of change, and academic and administrative cultures. Similar to Clark (1998, 2004) and Gjerding et al. (2006), introducing entrepreneurship into university culture requires support both from the top and the bottom, especially the faculty. Academic decision makers behave entrepreneurially to external opportunities for financial and/or branding reasons but they respect their colleagues’ decisions whether to join. The traditional inter/intra faculty model needs to include external stakeholders for entrepreneurial teaching initiatives. German universities have been successfully using this model for external research programmes without changing their core purpose: teaching and research.