“Carrying out innovation is the only function which is fundamental in history”, was one of the visionary quotes of Schumpeter (1939)

Fifty years later, global economic crises caused significant challenges requiring the implementation of innovative solutions, based on reliable knowledge, to cope with the uncertainty of a constantly changing environment (OECD, 1996). Consequently, global economies have been transformed from industrial to knowledge-based economies. Thus, as legitimate knowledge providers institutions, universities’ role have been enhanced from education and research institutions to regional economic development actors. This role is increasingly enabled by the emergence of the Triple Helix model, which was introduced by Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff (2000), as a model of knowledge. The triple helix model is stressing three ‘helices’: academia/universities, industry, and state/government, that intertwine to shape innovation ecosystems, that are vital to regional development (Johnson, 2008) in today’s knowledge-based economy. Which is strategically aligned with the so-called university third mission, i.e., the university’s contributions to societal and economic development (Guerrero & Urbano, 2017) by ensuring knowledge commercialization beyond knowledge creation (second mission: research), and knowledge dissemination (first mission: teaching) (Audretsch et al., 2014).

From an organizational perspective, entrepreneurship is practically considered – by the same Schumpeterian theory – as a sustainable stream of innovation associated with the creation of economic, social and environmental value. Accordingly, as a part of its third mission, universities are strategically committed to enable adequate entrepreneurial conditions to stimulate innovation from the abundant knowledge flowing within. This implies activities like technology transfer, university-industry collaboration, or more specifically empowering student entrepreneurship and innovation, shifting the paradigm from generating job seekers to job creators graduates.

Moreover, studies revealed that empowering student entrepreneurship and innovation in universities, that are involved in a broader context of territorial sustainable development, does not depend separately on faculties, neither on students, nor decision-makers, but it relies on the set of actors and factors that create a balanced environment propitious for knowledge-based entrepreneurship (Audretsch, 2016). This inspires the concept of university-based entrepreneurial ecosystems (U-BEEs), which was defined by Prokop (2021) as a unique set of ties with local actors and factors that a university builds and utilizes for its commercialization activities to empower entrepreneurship. U-BEEs are essentially composed of technology transfer offices, academic founders, investors, experienced entrepreneurs, and business incubators, and vary on a spatial dimension, with a particular geographical location and reach.

On that account, the entrepreneurial university model arises, to fulfill the university’s third mission, based on U-BEEs, by leveraging the relevance, between universities’ human, organizational and social capital. Which is shaping the components of an intellectual capital rooted in the knowledge flowing inside universities and branched as a competitive advantage on a local, regional and global scale.

Therefore, ABCURR Entrepreneurial Institute is positioned to build entrepreneurial ecosystems as backbones for entrepreneurial higher education institutions as the new sustainable model of innovative higher education institutions in the MENA region. By adopting the holistic ecosystem approach to build entrepreneurial ecosystems for entrepreneurial higher education institutions in MENA

We use the framework of Isenberg who identifies six domains within the entrepreneurial system: a conducive culture, enabling policies and leadership, availability of appropriate finance, quality human capital, venture friendly markets for products, and a range of institutional supports