The Role and Importance of Innovations for Higher Education

Introduction

Progressive globalization makes national economic systems more interdependent than before, therefore it implies new qualitative connections at the level of states, but also at the level of individual organizations. Interdependencies result from the increasing level of freedom and dynamics of transactions. The surroundings of the university are subject to dynamic changes, the source of which is, inter alia, in globalization. For this reason, it is recognized that in order to operate effectively on the market, continuous innovative changes are necessary. They should also go in line according to the paradigm of the mandatory imperative of development changes (Borowiecki & Siuta-Tokarska, 2017). In turn, the need to make changes is an indisputable imperative of the modern global market economy. The decisions contents done by leaders of change should be based, among others, on knowledge and experience, and not only on intuition and habits. This applies to both profit-oriented and non-profit oriented institutions. The regularity has been noticed that development of methodological trends is consistent with changes in the environment. This may be referenced to the management of for and not-for-profit oriented organizations.

The university's relations with the environment cover a wide range of issues, including valorization or governance, i.e. the participation of representatives of universities as advisors in private and public institutions, both temporarily and for a longer period. Issues going beyond the framework of the university also include the commercialization of research results, as well as consulting and advising, science marketing, social responsibility of the university.

The role of the university has evolved considerably over time (Audretsch, 2014) and the change is mainly perceived in categories of how universities may contribute to the economic growth at the national level and even beyond. One of the reasons why such entrepreneurial path of academic development had to be undertaken was the need to find new financial sources for academic activities and in particular research academic activities (Hallam et al., 2017). Nevertheless, the financial requirement driven by the academic researches to be started and made at the universities were driers for entrepreneurial actions. The leading academic role for entrepreneurship and especially academic entities being part of entrepreneurial ecosystems were observed from the perspective of US universities (Miller & Acs, 2017).Transformation of the university to the model of the third generation university or entrepreneurial university (Clark, 1998) means that apart from education and research, it is also possible to distinguish the so-called third mission that involves relationships with the environment. The third mission also includes: expert activity and even business activities of the university.

There are attempts to systematize the issue of the entrepreneurial university's areas of activity, but it is impossible not to get the impression that this third mission of the university, apart from scientific activity and educational activity, is difficult to clearly determine, and even more to define. In order to describe the issues of the third mission of an entrepreneurial university, one can use a relational approach in which the university interacts with its surroundings, which is defined as academic engagement. Each formula of its definition concerns increasing the scope of the university's influence on the external environment, including external stakeholders. Literature review shows that despite many items that refer to an entrepreneurial university, there is no coherent approach that classifies issues of non-standard activities, hitherto existing, while also perceiving the problem of the need to open the university to the environment. It can be however noticed in the shaping of methodological trends that the sciences and methodologies adapt to changes in the environment.