Entrepreneurs-in-residence programmes: the SUIBE approach

In September 2021, the General Office of the State Council pointed out in The Guideline to Ramp up Support for College Students in Innovation and Starting Businesses that they will “implement the special talent plan for off-campus mentors in colleges and universities, explore the implementation of the Entrepreneur-in-Residence mechanism, and attract more outstanding talents to serve as mentors for entrepreneurship”. As a new mechanism of academic–business interaction in colleges and universities, the Entrepreneur-in-Residence programme is characterized by its diversity, adaptability and inclusiveness. Based on the context of innovation and entrepreneurship education in colleges and universities, combined with the pilot efforts of the Entrepreneur-in-Residence programme in the field of social entrepreneurship education as carried out by the Shanghai University of International Business and Economics in recent years, and in comparison with the cases of Entrepreneur-in-Residence pioneered by Harvard Business School and other colleges and universities, this research takes social entrepreneurship as a prism to analyse the problems and the development potentials of the Entrepreneur-in-Residence mechanism developed and implemented in China to provide new insights into how the academic–business interaction model in colleges and universities could promote social entrepreneurship education.