The enterprising academic: Embodying enterprise value among UWE staff across disciplines

There are many new demands on academics. One of these is to embed enterprise and entrepreneurship education within a range of different academic disciplines. Intergovernmental, governmental and professional organisations, as well as management experts, are looking to new ways to shape the commitment of educators to changing enterprising and entrepreneurial values of education. The catch cry, "be entrepreneurial" applies to academic too, as evidenced by QAA’s and Advance HE’s emphasis on an "enterprising agenda". However, educators are still grappling with the “how”, “what”, “why” and “for whom” of enterprise education (Larios-Hernandez et al, 2022). This paper looks at how the term "enterprising" is interpreted and practiced in different disciplines across colleges, especially comparing the College of Health, Science and Society (CHSS) and the College of Business and Law (CBL) at the University of the West of England (UWE). We collected data through a survey sent to all staff members in both colleagues and we will be running 3 participatory enquiry sessions.We have gathered different views from 44 UWE colleagues* (44% from CHSS, 40% from CBL, 15% from further areas of UWE including other colleges and professional services) in response to a questionnaire. 67.5% have between 2-6 years of experience in the institution, 77.5% of them being full time and 75% teaching focused as their primary role (66% in undergraduate or postgraduate courses). Our respondents include people in management, programme and module leaders or other staff members such as seminar tutors or lecturers. We have also gathered a range of accounts of lived experiences. These are tangible examples of how staff embed enterprise into their academic practice. The findings contribute towards suggesting recommendations to support educators’ resource and development needs to grow in competence and capacity for being enterprising in their work. Besides, the findings will support the university’s current Enterprise agenda 2030 as to be distinctive in Enterprise the organization will need to reflect on how that enterprise value is embedded among different disciplines. This might be transferable to other institutions that want to put the focus on Enterprise too.