Saudi Cultural Missions Theses & Dissertations
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Item Restricted Developing Dynamic Capability in Entrepreneurial Universities: An Empirical Study on Saudi Arabian Public Universities(Western Sydney University, 2024) Alkhudhayr, Feras; Nakanadala, DilupaAbstract Human capital development has conveniently been the main responsibility of universities. They typically fulfilled this obligation by engaging in research and teaching activities. However, universities have had to create strategies for fostering entrepreneurial development over time to contribute effectively to the local and global economies and respond to changes and emerging trends. Additionally, universities work to foster and support entrepreneurial initiatives to address the financial issues they are facing, primarily resulting from the reduced public funding for higher education in many countries. As a result, some traditional universities have transformed into entrepreneurial universities where dynamic capabilities have enabled them to adapt to rapidly changing environments. This study is informed by the dynamic capability concept (Teece 2007) and the Resource-based View theory (Barney 1991) from the strategic management literature and entrepreneurial university literature. The concept of dynamic capability has been presented to explain the emergence of entrepreneurial orientation in the innovation and entrepreneurship literature. Dynamic capability reflects an organisation’s capacity to sense, seize and reconfigure its potential to create a competitive advantage and to improve performance. This thesis draws on the concept of dynamic capability, where the development of dynamic capability at universities to support their entrepreneurial orientation is at the core of this study. The dynamic capability perspective serves as a link between an organisation's resources and its effective responses to the changing external environment. However, how entrepreneurial universities develop dynamic capability to support their entrepreneurial orientation has not been explicitly investigated in the literature. Therefore, this study aimed at closing this gap by examining how universities apply the entrepreneurial model and develop dynamic capabilities to become entrepreneurial. This is based on the following main research questions; 1. How do universities develop dynamic capabilities to become entrepreneurial? 2. What is the impact of the entrepreneurial orientation of universities’ academic departments on the development of dynamic capabilities? Additionally, innovation culture was identified to promote the attainment of competitive advantage and is an important incubator for creativity and innovation among entrepreneurial universities. Hence, this study also investigated the moderating role of innovation culture on the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and dynamic capability. The study focused on public universities in Saudi Arabia considering the strong government focus on entrepreneurial universities and that the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Education is keen on enhancing entrepreneurship skills among university students. Saudi Arabian universities encourage students to have strategic abilities in order to advance their competence in their primary fields and strive for excellence and innovation and become globally entrepreneurial. The research study included a two-phase, mixed method design. The use of mixed method design was intended to produce results that were thorough and trustworthy. The study selected seven public universities in Saudi Arabia as the case universities based on the degree of application of the EU model. In the first qualitative phase, data was obtained using semi-structured interviews with 16 strategic management professionals from the seven case universities. The collected qualitative data was then transcribed and analysed thematically. In the second quantitative phase, an online survey questionnaire was used to collect quantitative data which targeted a sample size of 126 heads of academic departments in the case universities. The collected quantitative data was then coded and analysed using descriptive and inferential analyses. The findings of the study revealed entrepreneurial activities among public universities in Saudi Arabia. Six key themes were identified from thematic analysis, showing how public universities in Saudi Arabia develop dynamic capabilities to become entrepreneurial. Specifically, the findings suggest that the development of dynamic capability is enhanced through entrepreneurship training and infrastructure, commercialisation of university research outputs, improvement of entrepreneurial skills and performance, fostering open innovation, sustaining strategic alignment and policy adjustment for entrepreneurship, and implementation of reform initiatives and effective communication. Theoretically, the study contributes to the literature on strategic management by expanding the knowledge on dynamic capability and entrepreneurial orientations to the university context. The findings contribute to the body of literature by the addition of entrepreneurial activities (third-mission) to the teaching and research activities compared to previous studies. In addition, the findings add to the body of EO research by offering new perspectives on how to think about EO as a composite construct of four components consistent with the ENTRE-U scale adapted to the university context. The research also conceptualised the three-dimensional dynamic capability literature, which includes sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring capability, which is consistent with the theoretical perspective put forth by Teece (2007, 2014, and 2018) as the dominant framework in the field of research on dynamic capability. The results of the present study shed new light on the particular micro-foundations of dynamic capability that are relevant in the Saudi Arabia public university setting, including cognitive capability, managerial experience, knowledge transfer and the organisational structures of institutions. The findings of the quantitative phase showed that the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) of academic departments has a significant positive impact on sensing, seizing and reconfiguring capabilities. The study did not find evidence for innovation culture moderating the relationship between the EO of academic departments and their dynamic capabilities. The methodological implications add to the body of research on strategic management by showing the extended utility of existing measures for two key constructs which are entrepreneurial orientation of academic departments and dynamic capability. New measures of dynamic capability were developed based on the qualitative research results, which offer more comprehensive measurements for future researchers. The findings also show that university executives should create a managerial vision that considers the significance of entrepreneurial orientation and create distinctive dynamic capability among academic departments in order to obtain and maintain a competitive edge.11 0