Universities Addressing Society's Most Pressing Problems by Supporting Social Entrepreneurial Scholar-Practitioners

• In Event: Just Academia? Higher Education Organizations as Social Spaces for Equitable Transformation

Abstract

In these difficult economic times, universities are being scrutinized for their value and relevance (Watson et al. 2011). While they are often thought of as a key stakeholder in multi-stakeholder place-based collaborations that are formed to address complex wicked problems (Murphy and McGrath, 2018), the operationalisation of university-community engagement has proven to be very difficult (Barker, 2015). This is due to identified barriers including: a lack of entrepreneurial culture amongst academics, the gap between university research agendas and community needs for research, and university reward structures that focus on peer-reviewed publication (Jongbloed et al., 2008).

Universities are able to prepare students to tackle complex wicked problems throughout their lives by requiring that during their studies students engage with place-based problems that are connected to large-scale wicked problems (Lake et al., 2016). While there is this recognition for students to engage in real-world problems, the benefits of community-engaged learning is predominantly considered from the vantage point of students and universities, rather than from the benefits to communities (Brudney and Russell, 2016).

By referring to the education, social entrepreneurship and complexity science literature, this paper argues that identified university-community engagement barriers can be addressed and the benefits for communities from community-engaged learning can be enhanced, if universities support the development of social entrepreneurial scholar-practitioners that contribute towards addressing complex wicked problems. Scholar-practitioners are individuals who “have one foot each in the worlds of academia and practice and are pointedly interested in advancing the causes of both theory and practice” (Tenkasi & Hay, 2008, p. 50).

To illustrate how social entrepreneurial scholar-practitioners can contribute towards addressing wicked problems in practice, this paper describes two case studies. The first case study focuses on scholars at Edith Cowan University who took on the role of scholar-system stewards to address food insecurity in the South West region of Western Australia and incorporated a Higher Degree Research student into the system stewardship. The second case study is the author’s own scholar-system social entrepreneur journey of commercialising her Masters and PhD social science research through a social enterprise approach that was assisted by the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia.

The paper concludes by suggesting that universities could globally scale the impact of their social entrepreneurial scholar-practitioner efforts by participating in international networks such as the newly formed Catalyst 2030 social entrepreneurial scholar-practitioner group. Catalyst 2030 is a network of system social entrepreneurs that was launched at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos for the purpose of achieving the SDGs (Pearson and McElwee, 2021).

Author

• Sharon Zivkovic, University of South Australia