Abstract
High expectations are placed on universities to deliver well beyond their traditional outcomes (graduation and research) and support societal outcomes as their third mission and beyond. Yet, we see a dearth of performance measurements and research comparing universities considering the third mission outcomes, particularly around entrepreneurship support. To address this need, we rely on the ambidexterity perspective and use a slack-based data envelopment analysis (DEA) to compare efficiencies of 28 Indian universities in delivering entrepreneurship support alongside their traditional outcomes. The contribution of the study is two-fold. Firstly, we rate and compare the universities and identify the orientations towards particular mission outcomes of graduation, research, and entrepreneurship support. From our analysis, we find that fully efficient universities were only a few and were performing well across all the three outcomes. Secondly, we then use orientation and efficiency as a way to measure extent to which the universities can pursue third mission outcomes given their history. We note a path dependence among private universities that have mostly developed with a graduation orientation, to shift to entrepreneurship support without a research base. The study also comments on improving the existing national university ranking mechanisms that use subjective weights and does not consider the scale and orientation of the universities.
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The corresponding author received Indian Institute of Science research fellowship during the conduct of this research. Parts of this paper may form part of the corresponding author’s PhD thesis.
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Loganathan, M., Subrahmanya, M.H.B. Efficiency of Entrepreneurial Universities in India: A Data Envelopment Analysis. J Knowl Econ 14, 1120–1144 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-022-00897-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-022-00897-z