Building Entrepreneurial Capacity in Universities Through Cross-Institutional Staff Training

Abstract

Universities are increasingly expected to act as entrepreneurial and innovation-driven organisations, yet the development of entrepreneurial capacity among academic and professional staff remains uneven and fragmented. To address this issue, this study examines a cross-institutional knowledge management intervention designed to reduce fragmentation in university entrepreneurship support and strengthen staff capacity in innovation ecosystems. The study is situated within a five-university EIT HEI project and draws on needs-assessment data from all partner institutions, while the empirical evaluation focuses on two staff training cases implemented in Finland and the United Kingdom. Building on a multi-site needs assessment, semi-structured interviews and partner competence mapping were thematically analysed and formalised using a DACUM-based competence map that codifies three duty areas: (1) commercialisation of research and innovations, (2) student entrepreneurship support, and (3) innovative teaching methods in entrepreneurship. The resulting competence architecture specifies role-relevant tasks, required knowledge/skills/attitudes, supporting tools, and performance evidence, enabling transfer across heterogeneous academic and professional staff groups. The mapped competences were operationalised through blended local training and mentoring. In the two evaluated cases, training participation was associated with improved self-reported confidence in navigating entrepreneurship ecosystems, stronger cross-silo collaboration, and early spillover effects such as staff acting as ambassadors and strengthening links to external ecosystem actors. However, the study also identified challenges related to staff engagement, knowledge institutionalisation, and sustaining learning beyond project-based interventions. The findings suggest that structured competence mapping combined with multi-channel delivery can function as an effective KM design for eliciting, codifying, and scaling entrepreneurial support knowledge in higher education, while highlighting the need for stronger incentives and more systematic evaluation to sustain participation and evidence impact.