Academic Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Poland

Abstract

The aim of changes in the structure of higher education in Poland should be encouraging competitiveness processes, and the essence of changes is creating an entrepreneurial university. The creation of an entrepreneurial university gives the academic community the possibility of commercialisation of research. Without a significant increase in innovation, academic entrepreneurship will be trapped in stagnation. Focusing academic entrepreneurship on innovation is a very difficult task, because the academic environment is characterised by a very low level of entrepreneurship. Changes in the functioning of institutions of higher education in Poland occur at a slow pace and are even further delayed by the traditional bureaucratic structure of the university, the university authorities reluctance to use flexible methods of management, lack of market instruments to support academic entrepreneurship. A tool for stimulating academic entrepreneurship is to create conditions for the development and support of innovative spin-off and spin-out business. Innovative academic enterprises require significant capital investment whose return is burdened with very high risk. This is one of the reasons for the slowdown of the process of innovation development of academia. The main aim of the study is to assess the level of university management effectiveness by showing how the highest value of the university, its employees, students, graduates and their knowledge, is better than ever before. In order to ensure proper fulfillment of the main objective, specific objectives have also been formulated. Implementing the objectives of the study requires addressing several research problems. The main problem is to assess the level of organizational efficiency of universities by comparing to the best (benchmarking results). This involves creating a model for managing the university and determining what dimensions and criteria should be created for a model that evaluates organisational effectiveness. Key factors in organisational effectiveness (cost and financial) had to be defined. It is also important to evaluate the effectiveness of the organisation and the criteria adopted for the evaluation of organisational effectiveness.