Every year, thousands of young people enter our universities with ideas, ambition and an appetite to solve problems.
Some will build businesses. Others will develop technologies, create social value or find opportunities where others see constraints. Some will become employers and innovators in an economy that urgently needs both.
Our responsibility in higher education is increasingly clear. Universities must do more than prepare students to participate in the economy; they must equip them to help shape it. Across South Africa’s higher education system, that shift is already under way.
Through Universities South Africa’s entrepreneurship development in higher education programme, I have had the privilege of working with universities across the country. What I see is not a sector standing still.
Universities are experimenting with new approaches, expanding support for student entrepreneurs, strengthening entrepreneurship education and developing innovation and incubation capacity.
The question is therefore no longer simply whether universities should support entrepreneurship, but how we embed it more deeply into the institutional fabric of our universities.
Entrepreneurial universities
Entrepreneurship in higher education has often been associated with specific activities: an incubator, business plan competition, pitch event, hackathon, workshop or funding opportunity.
These interventions remain important, giving students exposure, confidence, networks, skills and opportunities. However, our experience is showing us entrepreneurship can achieve much more when it moves beyond individual programmes and becomes part of how the university itself thinks and operates.
An entrepreneurial university is not simply a university that teaches entrepreneurship. It is an institution that behaves entrepreneurially. It connects disciplines, enables students with promising ideas to find support, creates pathways for research to generate social and economic value, and builds partnerships with business, government and communities.
Importantly, entrepreneurship cannot belong only to the business school or faculties of commerce. The next important South African innovation may emerge from engineering, agriculture, health sciences, education, the creative industries, computer science or the humanities. Entrepreneurial opportunities must therefore become increasingly accessible across disciplines.
We are already seeing the shift
One of the encouraging developments has been the growing recognition that entrepreneurship requires an institutional ecosystem rather than a collection of isolated activities.
Across our universities, we are seeing structures, networks and programmes connecting students, academics, entrepreneurship practitioners, institutional leaders and external partners. This matters because entrepreneurial universities are built by people: leaders who create enabling environments, academics who encourage entrepreneurial thinking, professional staff who enable students, researchers who explore how knowledge can create wider value, and external partners who bring networks, expertise and opportunities.
Most importantly, they are built when students are recognised not only as recipients of education, but also as creators.
Bigger than starting businesses
South Africa’s unemployment challenge makes entrepreneurship an urgent national conversation, but we should not present it as a convenient cure for unemployment. Not every student should start a business, nor should entrepreneurship education be measured simply by the number of companies graduates register.
Our ambition is broader. We want graduates who can recognise opportunities, solve complex problems, mobilise resources, collaborate, create value and navigate uncertainty. These capabilities matter whether someone establishes a business, joins a corporation, works in government, develops a social enterprise or serves a community.
Entrepreneurship, understood this way, is about developing agency. It is about helping students move from asking, “Where will I find an opportunity?” to also asking, “What opportunities can I create?”
Next frontier is institutional
The work ahead is not about criticising universities for what they have not done. It is about building on the significant foundation that already exists and asking what the next generation of the entrepreneurial university should look like.
We need entrepreneurship embedded more deeply across disciplines; stronger pathways connecting research, innovation, commercialisation and societal impact; easier access to entrepreneurship support for students; stronger connections with surrounding entrepreneurial ecosystems; and continued development of academics, professional staff and institutional leaders.
We must also become more ambitious about measuring progress. Beyond counting programmes, workshops and policies, we should ask what these interventions enable.
Are students developing stronger entrepreneurial capabilities? Are student businesses surviving and growing? Are university innovations reaching communities and markets? Is research creating economic and social value? Are graduates creating opportunities for themselves and others?
Building the university of the future
The entrepreneurial university cannot be built by an entrepreneurship office or programme alone. It requires institutional leadership, academics, professional staff, students and partnerships with industry, government, investors and communities.
We are not starting from zero. There is significant experience, infrastructure, commitment and innovation within our university system. Our task now is to connect these efforts, learn from what works, strengthen institutional capability and move entrepreneurship increasingly from the margins towards the mainstream of university life.
Building an entrepreneurial university does not replace the fundamental university mission of education, research and advancing knowledge. It strengthens our ability to translate that mission into wider economic and social impact.
The university of the future should therefore be more than a place where young people prepare to enter the economy. It should also be a place where students, academics and partners imagine, experiment with and build what comes next.
That is the entrepreneurial university we are working towards. Across South Africa’s higher education system, that journey has already begun.
Dr Gumbo is director of the entrepreneurship development in higher education programme at Universities South Africa.
Sowetan