Our main mission is to help higher education institutions in the MENA region build their sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems toward the knowledge-based economy transition, leveraging the knowledge currency as the main driver for innovation and growth.
Considering that the concept of the university’s third mission encapsulates many of the rising demands on higher education institutions to take a more visible role in optimizing the utilization of knowledge in favor of regional economic development. The major challenge faced by education institutions in the MENA region, particularly refers to activities and assets of university-based entrepreneurial ecosystems, including technology transfer, university licensing, science parks, incubators, and university spin-offs. Thus, universities are addressing challenges with wider managerial autonomy to increase their accountability, but with a need for new assessment processes to improve the measurement tools and, managerial reporting systems.
Moreover, despite multiple existing ranking systems for the first and second university missions, the third mission lacks cohesive methodologies to describe what universities do in this regard (Montesinos et al., 2008). In addition, empirical studies reveal that universities still lack specific information and tools to monitor and evaluate activities of their third mission activities (e.g., Wright et al., 2004). Thus, the university’s third mission activities cannot be simply conceptualized as a marginal term like teaching and research, because it entails a wide variety of activities that go beyond the university’s managerial capabilities. Hence, the convergence of the three university missions – commonly represented by teaching, research, and impact – requires a different perspective than the traditional measurement tools applied for universities.
Furthermore, the increasing pressure of economic crises, forces universities to re-engineer their existing performance systems and to generate an environment of collaboration with industry and government, such us U-BEEs, in reference to the triple helix model. Accordingly, Etzkowitz (2016) called for the development of metrics addressing the engagement of universities in triple helix models. Therefore, the intellectual capital perspective is highly recommended to help in the identification of structural and personal strengths and weaknesses and to reveal the state of the art of the university’s third mission engagement.
Thus, with ABCURR mission, we suggest the intellectual capital perspective as a comprehensive measurement system for the university’s third mission activities, not only on the theoretical side but also in practice, addressing both the need to provide managerial information as well as reporting of universities. This is particularly crucial to nascent U-BEEs, where universities are stressed – from day one – to build and maintain the accountability of U- BEEs by optimizing universities’ knowledge flow to meet the expectations of their regions. This approach aims at analyzing how the intellectual capital perspective can inspire assessment instruments for U- BEEs, and how people, processes, and relationships involved in universities’ knowledge flow, can be mobilized accordingly.