Ph.d.-forsvar: Giulio Pantano

The modern entrepreneurial university is concerned with fostering knowledge transfer, innovation and entrepreneurship by engaging its students and researchers with societal actors in a broad spectrum of collaborative activities. However, sustaining such collaborations requires bridging the diverse and sometimes conflicting expectations of the various actors involved, including the university itself.

Giulio Pantano’s PhD project delves into how the entrepreneurial university must recursively grapple with these intrinsic and systemic tensions, ultimately designing valuable collaboration programs that invite actors to interact, align and co-create effectively.

We asked Giulio to share his main findings of his PhD project with us:

This research is grounded in the Service-Dominant Logic's axiom that value is always co-created, and it advances the idea that addressing "value tensions" emerging within specific co-creative activities is pivotal to fostering effective stakeholder relationships:

• first, we devised a broader conceptual framework for co-creation of value within the stratification of knowledge transfer activities and programs (service systems);
• then, we exploited the setting of entrepreneurship education to 1) operationalize value tensions and 2) learn how educators act upon tensions in designing their programs.

Eventually, this PhD project advances the scholarly understanding of the entrepreneurial university by probing into its functionality as a value co-creation institution, and proposes value co-creation both as a strategic mission and a unique value proposition for the entrepreneurial university.

Summary

In the global economy's shift towards a knowledge-based paradigm, universities have been compelled to reassess their roles, not only as educational and research centers but also as economic actors. The modern entrepreneurial university is concerned with fostering knowledge transfer, innovation and entrepreneurship by engaging its students and researchers with societal stakeholders in a broad spectrum of collaborative activities.

However, sustaining such activities requires acknowledging the diverse and sometimes conflicting expectation of the various (and often many) stakeholders involved, including the university itself. Furthermore, the challenge lies also in orchestrating the portfolio of such activities. As such, this thesis advances the very notion of entrepreneurial university by addressing how complex and systemic value tensions arise in its multi-stakeholder activities. Grounded in a qualitative methodological framework, this research exploits the lens of Service-Dominant Logic (SDL), a marketing mid-range theory that has addressed how value is co-created and distributed in collaborative settings.

This dissertation unfolds across three interrelated articles (A-C), each addressing different facets of the value co-creation and tension reconciliation process within the entrepreneurial university's activities. Article A employs SDL to explain value creation and proposition dynamics within the entrepreneurial university, conceptualizing it as a network of service systems. Article B focuses on a specific type of entrepreneurial university’s activity, that is a case-study of entrepreneurship education, assessing how multiple stake-holders concretely negotiate value creation influencing the educational design. Finally, Article C shifts to entrepreneurship educators, exploring their design practices in navigating value tensions to deliver effective educational programs.

By synthesizing insights across these studies, the dissertation contributes significantly to understanding the entrepreneurial university as a complex, adaptive system poised at the intersection of academia, industry, and society. It highlights the need for strategic approaches to design and manage multi-stakeholder engagements and co-creation activities, with the aim of addressing and reconciling the inherent value tensions. This work ad-vances the scholarly understanding of the entrepreneurial university's functionality as a value co-creation institution, offering valuable theoretical and practical insights for navi-gating the intricate landscape of higher education in the knowledge economy.

Keywords: entrepreneurial university; value creation; co-creation; Service-Dominant Logic; stakeholder engagement.

Supervisors

Associate Professor Sara Grex, DTU Engineering Technology
Associate Professor, Lars Alkaersig, DTU Entrepreneurship

Examiners

Associate Professor Kristina Vaarst Andersen, DTU Engineering Technology
Associate Professor Anna Brattström, Lund University
Associate Professor Thomas Crispeels, Vrije Universiteit Brussel