Supporting Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Higher Education in The Netherlands
The higher education sector in The Netherlands offers excellent examples of what it means to be innovative and entrepreneurial, and promote entrepreneurial mind sets, entrepreneurship and knowledge exchange. Creating value from academic knowledge through innovative services, products, processes and business models that meet economic, social and environmental needs lies at the core of this strategy. The current challenge is to strenghten the anchoring of value-creation processes in education and research. This can be achieved through increased interdisciplinarity, entrepreneurial mindset development across all subject areas, incentives for effective wider world engagement of researchers and students, and growth-oriented support for startups. This report presents an in-depth analysis of the policy framework and institutional practices and provides useful guidance for policy makers and university leaders across the world. HEInnovate is a joint initiative of the European Commission and the OECD to promote the innovative and entrepreneurial higher education institution.
Strengthening entrepreneurship support in higher education in the Netherlands
This chapter expands on the findings presented in related to start-up support in higher education institutions (HEIs) in the Netherlands. It shows that there is a very strong entrepreneurship support infrastructure in HEIs in the Netherlands, including various good practice initiatives to support entrepreneurial students and staff, for example through training, access to premises and facilities, provision of mentors, and connections into networks. This chapter discusses how HEIs can scale, develop, refine, continue and build on the existing support infrastructure and networks, including how to ensure that encouraging entrepreneurial behaviour can be consistent with institutional reward structures, rules and regulations. In its final section, the chapter analyses the role of HEIs in developing and leading entrepreneurial ecosystems and identifies areas of improvement.