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Globalisation, Societies and Education

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Academic entrepreneurialism in a context of altered governance: some reflections of higher education in Hong Kong
Rui Yang
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Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Published online: 03 Sep 2012.

To cite this article: Rui Yang (2012): Academic entrepreneurialism in a context of altered governance: some reflections of higher education in Hong Kong, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 10:3, 387-402 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2012.710475

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Globalisation, Societies and Education Vol. 10, No. 3, September 2012, 387 402

Academic entrepreneurialism in a context of altered governance: some reflections of higher education in Hong Kong
Rui Yang*
Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (Received 30 November 2011; final version received 28 March 2012)

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Academic entrepreneurialism appears to have become global. University systems around the globe are moving in the direction of a more entrepreneurial model of higher education. Scholars have not yet reached a consensus on the definition of entrepreneurship. Research on academic entrepreneurship in East Asia has been lacking. This article contributes to the discussion by reviewing the rise of entrepreneurialism in Asian higher education, using Hong Kong as an example. After some analyses of the definitions, rationales and pathways of academic entrepreneurship, it shifts its attention to entrepreneurship in Hong Kong, and discusses how entrepreneurship has been demonstrated in Hong Kong higher education. It argues that while Hong Kongs entrepreneurial spirit is strong in the local culture and business, its achievement in academic entrepreneurship is relatively low. This article ends by cautioning readers about the differences between academic and business entrepreneurship. Keywords: academic entrepreneurship; higher education; Hong Kong; the university; governance

Introduction Over the past one and a half decades, entrepreneurship and market-driven innovation have become more prevalent in higher education. Like it or not, entrepreneurship is very much a part of the fabric of contemporary higher education in many national systems. Higher education scholarship has increasingly applied entrepreneurial terminology and frameworks to studies on a wide range of market-oriented phenomena that include academic capitalism, technology transfer and university contributions to economic development. Although the study of entrepreneurship dates back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Mars and Rios-Aguilar 2010), academic entrepreneurship has only recently emerged as a growing focus of intellectual inquiry. Despite the growing importance of an extensive body of research, there has been little effort to link the conceptualisation of entrepreneurship to higher education practices, especially in East Asia, where pathways of transformation
*Email: yangrui@hkucc.hku.hk
ISSN 1476-7724 print/ISSN 1476-7732 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2012.710475 http://www.tandfonline.com

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of the entrepreneurial university have appeared quite different from those in the West. Except for Mok (2001, 2005), few scholars have written on academic entrepreneurialism in East Asia. This article attempts to examine the agenda of higher education in Hong Kong in response to the global trend of academic entrepreneurialism, set in a context of altered governance.

Academic entrepreneurship: definitions, rationales and pathways Definitions Support for enterprise and entrepreneurship development in higher education is not a new phenomenon. However, many people in higher education eschew the notion of entrepreneurship. To them, the word conjures up the spectre of a forprofit motive, about which they are suspicious and disapproving. Indeed, entrepreneurship is much related to business. As a distinct mode of thought and action, it derives from business. Yet, it can operate in any realm of human endeavour. Its defining trait is the creation of a novel enterprise that the market is willing to adopt. It thus entails the commercialisation of an innovation. New ideas, products or organisational schemes matter little until they achieve concrete reality in the marketplace, that is, until they are actually used. It is a process of fundamental transformation from innovative idea to enterprise and from enterprise to value. By fusing innovation and implementation, it is a unique process that allows individuals to bring new ideas into being for the benefit of themselves and others. However, there has been no single, universally accepted definition of entrepreneurship. It is a multifaceted phenomenon that cuts across many disciplinary boundaries (Low and MacMillan 1988). Studies falling under the rubric of entrepreneurship have pursued a wide range of purposes and objectives, asking different questions and adopting different units of analysis, theoretical perspectives and methodologies. As Shane and Venkataraman (2000, 217) have declared, rather than explaining and predicting a unique set of empirical phenomena, entrepreneurship has become a broad label under which a hodgepodge of research is housed. Many researchers have labelled a wide variety of processes and strategies as entrepreneurial without explicitly providing a rationale for why they should be considered as such. They have operationalised terms such as entrepreneurial activities or entrepreneurial climate without offering technical, conceptual or theoretical guidelines to justify the use of such proxies. In the higher education literature, entrepreneurship has acquired an increasing presence. Existing research focuses overwhelmingly on examining market-oriented phenomena, failing to take into consideration in their analyses many other non/less-market-oriented activities, such as teaching, learning and curriculum development. Significant lessons could be learnt from the corporate sector that are relevant to academic entrepreneurship, which generally refers to the creation of

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an environment for active support of knowledge exploitation, stimulation of entrepreneurial behaviour among all the members of and institutional structures in the academic community. There are multiple intersections between entrepreneurship and higher education. Entrepreneurship has much to contribute to higher education. The technical aspects of entrepreneurship including disruption, innovation and value creation have significant implications for higher education at individual, institutional and societal levels. The functional equivalent of commercialisation of an innovative idea, product or organisational scheme can include the development and implementation of an innovative academic programme or a new and sustainable way of delivering a programme. Such an educational product is a sustainable enterprise that generates value. For a nation, this value of the enterprise fosters a highly qualified labour force. For a higher learning institution, it helps to provide its staff members with an opportunity to advance their careers and contribute to the building of knowledge in a field. It benefits academic programmes and meets societal needs. For individual academics, the sustainable value promotes a combination between professional career and personal satisfaction, and provides students with innovative pre-professional training and involvement and even a portal to higher earnings over a lifetime. Rationales The rationale for an entrepreneurial university is in the growing focus of public policy on enhancing the role that the higher education sector plays in social and economic development. Higher education is increasingly encouraged to engage with the stakeholder community, in particular with regional and local development agencies and local business. Advocates of entrepreneurship in higher education have provided various justifications. They largely fall into two categories, focusing respectively on the delivering and receiving ends of education. Clark (2000) is arguably the most prominent advocate. He insists that whether higher education has a future depends on the choice made by universities to remain in their traditional form or to react with an entrepreneurial spirit to the changes outside the academe. Citing examples from the historical developments of modern universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University in the United States, he argues that entrepreneurial spirit is a significant factor for their remarkable success. Another strong advocate is Etzkowitz (2008), who calls the adaptation of entrepreneurship the second academic revolution. According to him, the first academic revolution happened in the late nineteenth century when the university mission was expanded from teaching to both teaching and research. Universities were transformed from institutions of knowledge dissemination and cultural preservation to institutions for new knowledge creation. On top of the traditional task of teaching, research was then assumed as the basic function of universities. With the second academic revolution, serving national

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economic and social development has been added to the conventional university missions of teaching and research. Research-based new knowledge is translated into products and new enterprises. Universities move out of the ivory tower and become entrepreneurial. The movement leads to a fundamental change in the relationships between the state, the universities and industry. A Triple Helix has been invented to describe interactive relationships between them (Etzkowitz 2008; Leydesdorff and Etzkowitz 1998). While Clarks judgement might be appropriate to interpret the successful stories of MIT and Stanford University, the situation faced by many universities today is different: instead of adopting an entrepreneurial spirit proactively to implement reform and changes to themselves, they are forced into a situation in which they have to become more entrepreneurial in order to survive. For example, triggered by the quest for recovery after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, East Asian universities were pushed to implement a mission paradigm shift to academic entrepreneurialism so as to enhance national competitiveness and to promote a vibrant economy within the new global infrastructures (Mok 2005). There has been relatively much less thinking on the other rationale for academic entrepreneurship, that is, the focus on students as the end outcome of university education, although the need to encourage young people to be more enterprising is increasingly viewed as a significant aspect of education in many countries around the world. This is based on an understanding of the changing pattern of contemporary economic and social life. It aims not only to encourage young people to consider entrepreneurship as a career option but to seek to help them develop in ways that will help them cope in a world where life is becoming more complex and uncertain. People need to be more competitive and to have a more proactive approach to life. They need to upgrade their skills to compete favourably in the economic market, and as citizens to adjust to a more democratic lifestyle than they have been accustomed to in the past. More fundamentally, training students with an entrepreneurial spirit is demanded by the contemporary relationship between education and the economy. Future society faces many problems relating to social and economic changes. One effective way to meet the challenges is an education that prepares young people for a life-world of much greater uncertainty and complexity involving: frequent occupational, job and contract status change; global mobility; adaptation to different cultures; working in a world of fluid organisational structures (Ghoshal and Gratton 2002; Worrell, Kempbell, and Cooper 2000); greater probability of self-employment; and wider responsibilities in family and social life (Stonier 1983). Essentially, there is a need to change the culture of society from one of dependency to one that is more enterprising, and to encourage a spirit of entrepreneurship in young people. There is also pressure to prepare students for a world of life-long learning (European Commission 1996). More than a decade ago, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (1989) pointed out that changes in educational methods are needed to foster competence in being enterprising.

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Since then, this has been seen as a vitally important qualification needed by the young as they enter society. It has been believed that this competence has a positive, flexible and adaptable disposition towards change. Research has endorsed the need for education to play a leading role in such a cultural change, proposes that what the economy needs now is quite different from what was required in the past, and has pointed out a mismatch between the need for more enterprising young people and the fact that educational systems have been slow to make changes. Meanwhile, schools have been found to be remarkably resistant to change, much to the consternation of politicians, policy-makers and innovators (Hargreaves 1994, 12). Pathways Drawing from the US and European literature and experience, Clark (2004) recognises the need for a diversified funding base for universities, involving raising a high percentage of their income from non-public sources. In terms of organisation, entrepreneurial universities are managed in such a way that they become capable of responding flexibly, strategically and yet coherently to opportunities in the environment, something described by Clark as having a strong steering core with acceptance of a model of self-made autonomy across the academic departments. By so doing, entrepreneurship becomes part of the universitys core strategy. The ultimate outcome is to create an enterprise culture defined particularly as one open to change and to the search for, and exploitation of, opportunities for innovation and development. He identified five pathways of transformation for the entrepreneurial university, as follows. The first is through a strengthened steering core, comprising both university administrators and faculty deans, to seek proactively a diversified funding base for its institution and to allocate the resources internally. It subsidises new ground-breaking activities as well as old valuable programmes in the academic heartland. Leadership capacity takes the form of collegiality, rather than through personal strong-minded change agents. The second is by an enhanced developmental periphery. Within the traditional structure of entrepreneurial universities, there are two developmental centres: one is administrative offices promoting outreach with an emphasis on consultancy, industrial liaison, technology transfer and continuing professional education; the other is multi/trans-disciplinary academic units operating as basic units parallel to disciplinary departments. The two centres serve as mediating agents between the university and the organisations outside the academe, and help to generate research money and other income. The third is via a diversified funding base. Entrepreneurial universities avoid entire financial reliance on a single patron, and try to diversify their funding sources instead. The fourth is through the adoption of entrepreneurial practices in academic heartland units. Discipline-led units adopt entrepreneurial practices differently
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based on their disciplinary predispositions. Science and engineering departments are ahead of the social sciences. The humanities and arts often have an even longer way to move from resistance to acceptance. With this layered situation, universities in transformation often find themselves entrepreneurial on one side and traditional on the other. The fifth is an embracing entrepreneurial culture. All the aforementioned structural pathways of transformation need to be supported by a culture that is centred on an entrepreneurial spirit, which interacts with the structural ones.

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Entrepreneurship in Hong Kong When Hong Kong was ceded to the British in perpetuity by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, Queen Victoria was most distressed to know that only a piece of useless granite was added to her Empire. The British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston dismissed Captain Charles Elliot for the reason that he had obtained the cession of Hong Kong, a barren island with hardly a house upon it. It seemed obvious to him that Hong Kong would not be a Mart of Trae (Ho 1992, 1). However, entrepreneurs saw things differently. Earlier in 1836, Great Britains most significant opium trader, James Matheson, conceived the acquisition of Hong Kong Island as a factory for British, and notably Scottish, traders. He claimed that:
If the lions paw is to be put down on any part of the south side of China, let it be Hong Kong; let the lion declare it to be under his guarantee a free port, and in ten years it will be the most considerable mart east of the Cape. (Chan 1991, 21)

History has confirmed the entrepreneurs insights. What has puzzled economists is that Hong Kong is only a small city with approximately 7 million people living in an area of around 1064 sq. km. It does not possess any natural resources and has relied on outside sources for its fuel and raw materials. It has also imported much of its food supplies, largely from the Chinese mainland. The colony was described by a visiting American journalist in 1951 as a dying city (Ho 1992, 5). Things have changed dramatically since then. Hong Kong embarked on its export-led industrialisation in the early 1950s and experienced rapid industrialisation in the 1960s. Between 1961 and 1971, the average growth rate in real terms was approximately 11%, and by 1971, the per capita income reached HK$6096, placing it behind only Japan in the Asia-Pacific region (Riedel 1974, 11). Between 1986 and 1991, the city was still growing in real terms at an average annual rate of 6.5% (Chau 1993, 31). By 1990, the average per capita income in Hong Kong had grown to surpass that of its colonial motherland, Great Britain, and more investment was then flowing from the colony to Great Britain than from Great Britain to the colony (Vogel 1991, 68). By 1992 the GDP reached HK$742,582 million. After more than three decades of rapid growth, it has emerged as one of the richest economies in Asia (Chau 1993, 1). The city

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economy has outgrown its historical role as an intermediary in international trade, and a centre of redistribution in its respective regional markets. It is now a major international economy in its own right (Ho 1992, 10). Interpretations of Hong Kongs post-war success have focused on a variety of factors, including favourable geographical location, cheap and hardworking labour force, inflow of capital and entrepreneurs from the mainland, and laissez-faire capitalism (Szczepanik 1958). Among earlier studies, Chau (1993) was the only one to mention, albeit very briefly, that the economic success of Hong Kong was attributable to dynamic merchant entrepreneurs. Only recently have the theories that emphasise human agency attracted peoples attention. Theories of entrepreneurship have been used to explain the successful story in Hong Kong (Yu 1997). While these are all contributing factors, at a more fundamental level, Hong Kong is an entrepreneurial society with a long tradition of approving profit-seeking (King 1987, 59). As expressed by Rafferty (1991, 167), Hong Kong, more than any other place in the world, is dedicated to the pursuit of making money, more money. A strong profit-making mentality can be observed in everyday life. It is important to point out the cultural factors, not only because they are the most significant element to facilitate the development of entrepreneurship in Hong Kong, but also because they have specific implications for higher education. Although Hong Kong is a Chinese community and 98% of the population is Chinese, it is wrong to conclude that the culture is homogenous. Hong Kong is virtually an open society, exhibiting various religious beliefs, life styles, languages and political ideologies. It is also important to examine to what extent Hong Kongs society is influenced by western culture and the traditional Chinese values. The Chinese culture can be classified into the great tradition and the small tradition. The great tradition, an attempt to achieve a wealthy and strong nation, was pursued by scholars, philosophers and people of letters, while the small tradition, an attempt to keep a good life and good earnings, was pursued by the unlettered peasants. The culture of Hong Kong belongs to the small tradition. The great tradition of Confucianism has never found its roots in Hong Kong. The society, under British control, has been heavily influenced by western culture, particularly in pursuing material life and social status (Yu 1997). Consequently, profit-seeking is widely regarded as acceptable. People only become interested in things when they can see clearly their benefits from them.

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Entrepreneurship in Hong Kong higher education: initiatives and inaction Policy initiatives from the government Within the operational logic of Hong Kong capitalism, its higher education sector was never central to the economy during the colonial era. The Hong Kong colonial government controlled a limited growth of higher education. For

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example, the 1978 government policy allowed for only 3% growth in tertiary education (Shiev 1992). There were hardly research provisions from the universities in Hong Kong. When the government or industries were in need of knowledge for policy design or technological innovation, they purchased research from foreign countries, especially Britain. The research tradition in Hong Kong universities only started in the 1990s, when the Hong Kong Government began to pay much more attention to the higher education sector. The Hong Kong Government now plays a dominant role in higher education provision and development. Based on the British model, the University Grants Committee (UGC) was first established in 1965 to be responsible for advising the government on the development and funding of the then two institutions of higher education: the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. At present, there are eight institutions of higher education that are funded through the UGC. Policies adopted by the UGC significantly influence the development of the higher education sector (Mok 2001). While higher institutions in Hong Kong are run and ruled autonomously by their own ordinances and governing bodies and their academic freedom is well protected by the Basic Law (Article 137 in particular) of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Postiglione 2006), their development is mightily driven by the higher education policies surrounding the academy. Since the early 1990s, the Hong Kong Government has adopted a variety of strategies along the line of managerialism, quasi-marketisation and corporatisation in public policies and services (Cheung 1997). In 2000, a funding cut of 4% on higher education took place, and role differentiation among universities was demanded. In the 2000 Policy Address, the Chief Executive proposed massification of higher education with 60% of secondary school graduates pursing tertiary education by 2010, without sharing the financial responsibility needed for the expansion. The Sutherland Report published in March 2002 attempted to impose a consensus on all the UGC-funded institutions to be united as one body in order to make Hong Kong an education hub in the international academic market (Sutherland 2002, 6 7). The UGC then instructed a research teaching divide among the institutions funded under its aegis. Moving further from the Sutherland Reports demand for value for money, the government announced suddenly in March 2003 another 10% cut in funding for the UGC-funded institutions for the next academic year and indicated forthcoming further cuts. The linkage of the employee salary scale of UGC-funded institutions with that of the civil service was also abolished. The government induced marketisation of higher education by making all taught postgraduate and sub-degree programs operate on a self-financing basis, removing the quota for non-local research students, and relaxing the quota for non-local students in publicly funded undergraduate and taught postgraduate programs to 4%, opening the market for Chinese mainland and international students.

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Government spending cuts have forced universities to look for other sources to generate revenue. The Vice Chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, for example, urged his members to conduct more applied research and develop more links with the business and industrial sectors in order to attract external funding. As remarked by the Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong: A university will be like a domesticated animal in a zoo if it relies on the government to feed it. Instead we should roam free on a pasture (Wong 2004, 163). Within this policy context, the UGC is increasingly able to disseminate its accountability agenda in the Hong Kong higher education system in teaching, research, institutional management and quality assurance, and intervenes in the individual institutions managerial systems and affairs on the grounds of a rational and effective use of resources (French 1999). For example, elected deans have been replaced with directly appointed ones, based on the belief that appointment of deans would enhance their accountability to the universitys central administration and enable smoother communication links between the senior management and the faculty (Mok 2001).

Little action at institutional and individual levels Driven by a purpose to run higher education institutions efficiently and borrowing of the ideas and practices from enterprise, academic entrepreneurship is hoped to be used as a means by universities in Hong Kong to react to their shrinking financial commitment from the government. However, due to the combined effect of the facts that Hong Kong higher education institutions have long been well-fed relatively, that high academic salaries are linked to types of employment conditions rather than to individual performances, and that Hong Kong culture is extremely material-oriented, higher institutions in Hong Kong, especially those sitting at the pinnacle of the system, have not demonstrated the innovative dimension of entrepreneurship. They have not undertaken academic entrepreneurship in their domestic and international marketplaces, although they have been pushed strongly by the government to diversify their sources for revenue. One example is Hong Kongs lack of success in creating an Asian highereducation hub. In response to the financial crisis in 2008, Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tseng established a Task Force on Economic Challenges with himself as chair. It selected six new engines for economic growth for Hong Kongs knowledge-based economy to complement the traditional four pillars of financial services, producer and professional services, trading and logistics, and tourism. Education service was one of the six new engines selected to diversify the local economy in the wake of financial crisis and global recession and help power it towards recovery. The task force suggested that higher and continuing education play an expanding role in the region,

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along with medical services, cultural and creative industries, environmental industries, innovation and technology, and testing and certification. Indeed, Hong Kong has a number of benefits to offer prospective students. Its universities are highly regarded internationally and in the Asia-Pacific region particularly. Five of Hong Kongs public universities are ranked in the top 200 worldwide by the UK-based Times Higher Education Supplement league tables. The University of Hong Kong has been ranked especially highly as one of the worlds best universities, even ahead of institutions such as Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. Most recently, the system has been brought into line with universities in the United States and the Chinese mainland, making it easier for students from the US and Chinese systems to transfer to Hong Kong higher education institutions. A further advantage is that higher education in Hong Kong is considerably cheaper than in the USA, Australia, Canada and the UK, current world leaders in hosting international students. Since then, there have been some efforts towards the goal. The eight public universities created an internationalisation committee to figure out ways to raise their numbers of non-local students. Together with the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, university representatives have conducted joint recruitment efforts in India and Indonesia. Individual universities have also recruited in Southeast Asia, India and Pakistan, as well as in North America and Europe. The government has taken some actions to encourage this trend, including raising the allowed percentage of non-local students in these universities upward from 10% to 20%, adjusting immigration rules to ease entry for nonlocal students and allowing them to stay after graduation to work, and creating new scholarship funds to attract postgraduate students to Hong Kong for doctoral-level studies. The Department of Education has also allowed nonlocal students to enrol in continuing and self-financed courses, sometimes in collaboration with off-shore providers. However, there lack cohesive strategies within and between institutions to promote Hong Kong higher education, which remains relatively unknown outside the region, despite the fact that Hong Kong has the academic strength to pull off such a goal. Few students and their parents in Southeast Asia, India or Pakistan actually know about the University of Hong Kongs recent high position in the international rankings (Mooney 2008). Practically, there has been little effort to tackle barriers, including the omnipresent issue of where to house more students, brand management, concerns about the language of instruction and related cultural issues, the integration of non-local students with their local peers on campuses, and the public resources and political leadership involved. Having not been pushed into a situation that is as difficult as in Australia, individual institutions in Hong Kong have little incentive to adopt vigorous measures to compete with their Australian and British counterparts in China. Academics have been generally slow to look for

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solutions to the aforementioned barriers because they cannot see clear signs of any financial benefits in return for the extra load added to their normal work. On the other end of the spectrum of exporting educational services in Hong Kong is the cross-border delivery of higher education within the Chinese mainland. This falls into the category of transnational higher education, something that has been increasingly used to export education as an approach to international university cooperation. According to UNESCO and the Council of Europe (2001), it refers to education in which the learners are located in a country different from the one where the awarding institution is based: that is, any education delivered by an institution based in one country to students located in another (McBurnie and Ziguras 2007). During the past decade, the transnational provision of education has increased so dramatically that it is at the leading edge of the most fundamental change taking place in higher education today, evidencing the invisible hand of the market at work in allocating educational resources across borders efficiently. Asia is the region with most active participation in transnational higher education (Huang 2007). Within Asia, the Chinese mainland has been well documented as the worlds largest education-importing country, sending hundreds of thousands of students to study abroad. According to the Australian International Development Program, the total demand for tertiary education in mainland China will rise from 8 million students in 2000 to 45 million in 2015 (Bohm 2003; Marginson 2004). Indeed, as the worlds most promising market, the Chinese mainland has the potential to dwarf all traditional offshore markets. As one of the best respected higher education systems in this region, using English as its medium of instruction, Hong Kong is extremely well positioned to export its higher education services to neighbouring countries. With its geographical and cultural advantages, Hong Kong higher institutions are naturally expected to capture the Chinese market. The reality, however, is a far cry from such expectation. Here Australia serves as an illustrative contrast. The fact is that Australian universities have been the most dominant force in the Chinese mainland. The number of joint programs in mainland China increased to 745 by June 2004, with 169 programs qualified to award overseas (including Hong Kong) degrees (Ministry of Education 2004). By 30 June 2004, there had been 668 approved partnerships. A total of 51,893 students had been enrolled. The degree programs approved by the Chinese government were run in collaboration with 164 overseas universities or colleges. The overseas partners were predominantly from countries or regions with developed economies and advanced technology (China Education Daily 2004). With the biggest shares of educational service exports in the world, Australia and the USA were the dominant forces: Australia had the highest number of partnership institutions (29.3%), followed by the USA (26.8%). Hong Kong only occupied 13.4%. In consideration of all the advantages Hong Kong has, its share of the higher education market in the Chinese mainland could have been much more

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substantial. This is especially the case in comparison with Australia. According to Australian Education International (2006), Australias share of the Chinese market has grown exponentially. Over the past decade, the number of Chinese nationals studying at onshore and offshore Australian higher and vocational education institutions increased from 3828 to 63,543, close to 1700%. The Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee (2003) reported that 27 Australian universities (representing 71% of its then 38 members) had offshore programmes in mainland China in 2003, suggesting China as a major site of offshore activity for a large majority of Australias universities. Offshore programmes in China represented 13% of all reported current offshore activity by AVCC members. The number of Chinas joint programmes with Australian universities had surpassed those with US institutions by 2004 (Huang 2007). While Australian universities have been known for their aggressive marketing globally, especially within the Asia-Pacific region, it is interesting to note that Hong Kong has been much less actively participating in the China market. Closer scrutiny reveals a highly layered picture: the more prestigious the institutions are in the Hong Kong higher education system, the less active they are in the Chinese market; only four institutions were listed on the official website specifically on joint Chinese-foreign higher education programmes published by the Ministry of Education. Of the total shared by Hong Kong institutions, the percentages of the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Hong Kong Polytechnic University were respectively 13.6%, 9.1%, 9.1% and 68.2%, showing great institutional differentiation, dominated by Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Yang 2008). Apart from the joint delivery of certain degree programmes in the mainland, the only major campus-creating partnership between a local and a mainland university to date is the United International College, a venture in Zhuhai of Hong Kong Baptist University and Beijing Normal University. With 4000 undergraduates now enrolled in a liberal arts, English-medium bachelors degree programme, the United International College has just begun an experiment in offering Hong Kong-style university instruction and Hong Kong-accredited undergraduate degrees to a mainland student body in the mainland. As for the quality of graduates as the end result of education, studies have shown that employers in Hong Kong are not happy with the graduates from local higher institutions. This became an especially serious issue in the midst of the recent adverse economic climate. Generally, local employers have become more vociferous than they had ever been in complaining about the quality of the university graduates who newly joined the workplace. One of the strong criticisms of local graduates has been the lack of ability to think independently and creatively (Kan 2009, 1). This has been a focus in the media. It was echoed in local employers surveys such as the one published in March 2002 by the small-to-medium enterprises (SME) Committee of the

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Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce (HKGCC) on employers opinions about the performance of young employees, covering the period from July to September 2001 (SME Committee of HKGCC 2002). A similar assessment of local university graduates was published in November 2006. Local graduates were reported to have failed to convince the business community that they measured up to employers expectations. Conducted on 698 of the citys most influential business and opinion leaders, this survey found that local graduates lacked both appropriate attitudes towards work and vital skills. They compared poorly with those who had studied overseas: 63% of those interviewed in the survey rated graduates of European universities more highly than local graduates while 60% believed North American graduates out-performed those from Hong Kong universities (South China Morning Post 2006). Once again, one of the weaknesses of local graduates was their lack of pioneering spirit. Indeed, students themselves acknowledge this. A survey by the University of Hong Kong published in April 2002 revealed that university students were worried about their chances in getting a job, ways to develop a career and their own work abilities and attitudes (South China Morning Post 2002). Conclusion The context in which universities are operated has become very different. There is a broad consensus as to the nature of the pressures on higher education throughout the world to become more entrepreneurial. Higher institutions and the people working within them are pressured to play an enhanced role in contributing to the international competitiveness of their nation, often in an economic sense via a process of commercialisation of research (European Commission 2005). Demands are increasing to make higher education contribute more substantially to local economic and social development. Universities are urged to take centre stage in regional development strategies. Against such a backdrop, entrepreneurship is seen as an effective way to restructure any university that wants to be competitive and to survive and grow over time. Hong Kong seems to have a paradoxical situation: while Hong Kong has had a strong entrepreneurial culture, its achievement in academic entrepreneurship is relatively low. This is due to a variety of factors including the facts that Hong Kong academics are paid well without linking directly to their actual contribution to the workplace, that academic salary is largely separated from institutional entrepreneurial activities, and that higher education institutions are still able to receive substantial funding from the government. Unless personal benefits of academics and institutional managers are under threat, they would not participate proactively in their universitys entrepreneurial activities. On the other hand, it is important to warn against the romanticisation of entrepreneurship. It must be remembered that the entrepreneurship in the

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academic world is, and should be, fundamentally different from the entrepreneurship in the business world. As the act of being an entrepreneur, entrepreneurship means one who undertakes innovations, finance and business acumen in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods. It is linked innately to innovations for the purpose of profit-seeking. The concept has been extended to include social and political forms of entrepreneurial activities. In consideration of the fundamental differences between business organisations and educational institutions, the central focus of academic entrepreneurship could and should be different from that of business entrepreneurship. For educational institutions, the aggressive selfishness needs to be rejected as far as possible. The link between universities and industry is not always close and direct. A balance needs to be struck between the university as a public good and marketing to keep intact the core values of the academic ethos. Therefore, there is a need for revisiting Clarks (1998, 2000, 2004) thesis. In this regard, Hong Kong might have hit the mark by a fluke. While it is necessary for higher institutions in Hong Kong to advocate academic entrepreneurship, it is important to beware of the possible toxic influence of the selfish nature of business entrepreneurship on an educational environment. Experiences from elsewhere confirm this judgement. As Marginson and Considine (2000, 241 3) have pointed out, there have been some serious weaknesses in Australias practices. According to them, the limits of the enterprise university include: first, its leaders are too far detached from that which they lead, while at the same time, too much is asked of them; second, too often the enterprise university works around and against academic cultures rather than through them; and third, the internal institutional community has been thinned out. Their following remarks remain highly relevant today and internationally:
In becoming the Enterprise University, the university seems at risk of losing sight of its own distinctive features and achievements. In fact it might be losing control over the very means by which its own identity is formed. In very few cases did we find an executive strategy of enterprise and renewal that was matched by internal structures capable of mobilizing what [higher education researcher Burton] Clark calls the academic heartland of ordinary staff and students. (Marginson and Considine 2000, 6)

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