The Entrepreneurial University - a Response of Academic Leadership facing Current Challenges.

In order to survive and adapt in a complex, dynamic and ever-changing environment, university leaders have to restructure their institutions, to change the paradigm in which the institutions operate. The strategic option of academic leaders is not whether, but how to cope with the dynamic changes in the 21st century. The answer in the last decades, both in US and Europe, was the entrepreneurial university - a university that constantly monitors the environment and responds to its signals by providing graduates able to cope with the complexity and uncertainty of a global environment, by creating knowledge that is applicable to real life situations and by contributing to the well-being of the society by offering solutions to socio-economic issues. A change of paradigm means incorporating in the functioning of universities not only the principal of internal performance (number of students, study programs, etc) i.e. efficiency, but also external performance (the contribution in changing society for a better one) i.e. effectiveness. Leading the society for international competitiveness is the role of the university in the 21st century and can be fulfilled by reducing the gap between universities and the society. Universities need to become entrepreneurial in order to respond to the needs of the environment and contribute to economic development. The paper has two research objectives: (1) to provide an overview of the concept of entrepreneurial university and to compare how academic leaders approach the entrepreneurial university in US and Europe (2) to present both the framework of entrepreneurial university developed jointly by the European Commission and OECD and the strategic instrument HEInnovate and to analyse how Romanian universities approach the new paradigm and apply the HEInnovate instrument. The research findings are highlighting the importance of a strong leadership in universities in order to transform universities from a traditional paradigm to a new, entrepreneurial one that empowers them to cope with the changes in the environment. The outcome of the present paper will be useful for university leaders in guiding them reshaping the universities in order to perform in a highly competitive world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]