Investigating Entrepreneurial Universities’ Logics through System Dynamics: A Causal Loop Analysis

With the introduction of the third mission concept, universities have been increasingly asked to perform different activities besides teaching and researching, outreaching knowledge outside their boundaries and assuming a leading role in fostering innovation in modern knowledge-intensive societies. However, how do the three academic missions pursued by entrepreneurial universities interact with each other? To what logics do they refer? To address these questions, organizational logics are leveraged as a theoretical lens in this study. Thus, a qualitative system dynamics model (i.e., a causal loop diagram) was developed to investigate how entrepreneurial universities respond to logic multiplicity, providing different implications for both researchers and policy-makers.