Entrepreneurship development needs a national policy push to succeed at public universities

Even though entrepreneurship is increasingly being accepted among university students as an engine of economic growth and possible career choice, entrepreneurship development is taking place in an environment of serious challenges and constraints that a solid national policy framework should help to resolve. This, according to the National University Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Baseline that was completed in the last quarter of 2019.

The study, commissioned to the United Kingdom-based consulting company, namely Pivot Global Education Consulting Group Ltd, was undertaken under the auspices of Universities South Africa (USAf)’s Entrepreneurship Development in Higher Education (EDHE) programme. The study report was launched in Johannesburg on 26 February.

According to the report, participants in the research predominantly saw higher education as being the best place for delivering entrepreneurship development. However, they also expressed a need to embed entrepreneurship training at all levels of education, starting at early childhood education, through basic to high school, all the way to university.

Within the university sector, participants identified the biggest challenge as being the predominance of academic research and research output over concern for practical application – something found to be “at odds with the applied nature of entrepreneurship.” Considering that faculties and schools operate on a set curriculum, the biggest challenge is where to fit in entrepreneurship; whether it bears credits and whether it has dedicated teachers. For newly-established universities, still preoccupied with attracting quality staff, students and building the necessary infrastructure, the additional question is to what extent they need to prioritise entrepreneurship, whereas for students, across the board, the biggest consideration is whether entrepreneurship education adds to their workload, and for what additional benefit.

While all public universities in South Africa were found to have some kind of entrepreneurial activity (with 20% offering entrepreneurship degree programmes and 28% providing short courses in this discipline), fragmented, uncoordinated delivery was found to be the order of the day. With the responsibility of entrepreneurship spread across functions and departments, entrepreneurial activity featured dissimilar activities, often within the same institution, where little communication was found to take place across the system. The human resource element was found to exacerbate this problem, where staff proven to be entrepreneurs in their own right are few and far between.

The silo effect was found to be creating an even bigger challenge at institutions with multiple campuses.

The entrepreneurship baseline study also found no conclusive standard for measuring the impact of entrepreneurship development in higher education. Thus far, institutions have been measuring their successes by the number of course attendants, the number of businesses created and the extent to which these enterprises have survived. Measurement approaches also differ between and within institutions. While some indicate their successes by the number of students exposed to the concept of entrepreneurship, others look at key performance indicators of practitioners, while others focus on how much revenue practitioners attract to the institution — as opposed to the number of student entrepreneurs created.

These findings informed and underlined the need for a national policy framework for entrepreneurship development, which will be designed by the EDHE programme in close consultation with public universities.

• Audit entrepreneurship development activity within institutions
  The study further recommends that the national framework be made the basis on which universities should undertake internal audits of their own entrepreneurship development activities. The audits should address the silo effect and enable the emergence of a comprehensive picture of activities per institution, with the ultimate aim to streamline, centralise and coordinate all activities, going forward.
• Create an enabling environment for an entrepreneurial university
  Recognising that strong entrepreneurial universities require strong senior leadership and solid supporting structures, the study recommends leadership whose vision transcends the traditional methods of teaching and learning to create an entrepreneurial ecosystem that provides the space for key players, teams and supporting companies to meet and interact. An enabling environment, the report recommends, requires dedicated policies to guide the whole process of entrepreneurship development by prescribing coherent and measurable strategic outputs. The policies should also indicate the support regime that a university would provide to students with regard to research, commercialisation, ideation and innovation, among other matters, and also enable students to engage meaningfully in entrepreneurship on campus.

  To that end, the study recommends that:

  • the EDHE programme collaborate with the existing EDHE communities of practice and universities towards the appointment of a senior management level champion to consolidate entrepreneurial activity, per institution;
  • institutions strengthen the role of the EDHE communities of practice in supporting entrepreneurial activity;
  • entrepreneurship strategies be formulated, which spell out institutional goals and objectives for entrepreneurial development; and that
  • dedicated, well-resourced teams with strategic oversight for entrepreneurship development be appointed and be given a budget, clear job descriptions, titles and a mandate aligned with each institution’s policy position on entrepreneurship.
• Curriculum design
  Acknowledging that entrepreneurship development requires the delivery of entrepreneurial mindset skills integrated into course design, it is recommended that the EDHE programme should position itself as a broker to enable the provision of diverse informal learning opportunities and experiences to stimulate the development of entrepreneurial mindsets and practical skills delivery at its member institutions. To that end, EDHE should collaborate with the Council on Higher Education to create appropriate training of trainer programmes to infuse entrepreneurship into curriculum design. EDHE should also partner with other credible players in strengthening entrepreneurship practice and encourage institutions to assess their entrepreneurial culture from time to time.

  This recommendation dovetails with what Prof Ahmed Bawa, USAf’s CEO, proposed at the launch event on 26 February, to the effect that – rather than expect our member universities to re-do curriculum programmes on entrepreneurship, EDHE could be the aggregator for the best courses available – and create a platform from which to open up access to teaching and learning material for all institutions.

• Teaching and learning provision
  Conceding that the provision of teaching and learning entrepreneurship is the natural starting place, if entrepreneurship development is to be grown and accepted into mainstream, and also accepting that teaching and learning entrepreneurship embraces the idea that entrepreneurship is a teachable skill, the report has recommended that USAf design a skills audit to assess the institutional needs for developing and implementing the entrepreneurship agenda. USAf has also been tasked to seek funding that will enable institutions to allow staff to engage in non-conflicting entrepreneurial pursuits.

• Funding for entrepreneurship development
  In a way to still create an enabling environment in institutions, the report has recommended that a reward system be created, that will enable allocating strategic funds to institutions that ranked highly in their ability to deliver entrepreneurship development. The idea is to give an incentive to the high-performing institutions to ramp up their pace and quality of entrepreneurship development.

  To that end, the EDHE programme is encouraged to collaborate with institutions to ensure that they put monitoring and evaluation systems in place to primarily track their own progress in entrepreneurship development, but also to make them attractive to external funders. A recommendation is being made to the DHET – as the main funder of the EDHE programme, to find and allocate additional funding to institutions for entrepreneurship development. That money, however, must be tied to an institution’s ability to meet key performance indicators as set out in the national framework. That fund allocation should also be based on a scale of engagement to avoid disadvantaging smaller institutions.

Although all 26 public universities participated in this baseline study, the report does not identify any of them by name and this was a deliberate approach by the study sponsors. The aim of the baseline, as a benchmarking exercise, was not to single out best players among universities or to rank institutions. “This study was not a competition; it was about all institutions, and about our youth and economy,” Dr Norah Clarke, Director: Entrepreneurship, said at the baseline report launch function. The purpose was rather to paint a national picture of entrepreneurship policy, approach and delivery, and to pinpoint priority areas for the DHET and USAf to support universities better.

Dr Clarke went on to say that the proposed framework for future activity had to take context and the capacity of institutions into account, against a backdrop of historical and economic disparity, and bearing in mind that the perception of value and location of an institution played a significant role in its capacity and function.

She also reiterated what USAf CEO Professor Ahmed Bawa had said, to the effect that each university has a unique context, incomparable to the next. With that in mind, each of the institutions of higher learning has to work out its own way of addressing its problems and finding its own, unique, solutions.

According to Ms Charlene Duncan, Co-Convenor of the EDHE Community of Practice for Entrepreneurial Universities (and Director at the University of the Western Cape’s Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation), who was Programme Director at the recent baseline report launch event in Johannesburg, the process of developing the national entrepreneurship policy framework in higher education will next be visited in Pretoria, at the Entrepreneurship Lekgotla 2020 in July.

‘Mateboho Green is USAf’s Manager: Corporate Communications.