Third generation universities: A study on university shareholders to identify facilitators, barriers and success criterias

The emergence and subsequent development of universities in the sense that we acknowledge is heavily influenced by religious, political, economic and social pressures in a long historical process. Nowadays, higher education systems are faced with more confusion and uncertainties due to internal and external orientations such as information society, knowledge economy, entrepreneurship, competition, globalization and internationalization. Traditional universities are transformed from state-funded educational institutions into Third Generation Universities which are at the center of international know-how hub, where technology-based commercial activities are taking place and collaboration is growing. In this environment, it is an important requirement for universities to increase their competencies and competitiveness in national and international arena, to cooperate with industry, to earn income in a way to strengthen their financial status, to be managed with strategic management perspective, to conduct interdisciplinary studies and to carry out trainings that will sign mass and important inventions at the same time. In this context, the conceptual framework of the Third Generation University theory which is outlined by Wissema (2009) has been put forward in the first part of the study. In the second part; changing values of universities assessed with PESTEL analysis, dimensions of the Third Generation University model are defined and Facilitators, Barriers and Success Criterias that they will face in the aim of transforming Third Generation Universities are analyzed. In the third part; evaluations are made about a methodology and results of research which was conducted in an instituiton that looks the university-industry relationship and roles of universities in a society in a professional way. The aim of this study is to determine the factors that prevent and facilitate the transformation efforts from the traditional university structure to the Third Generation University in line with the needs and expectations in the structure of information society and information economy, and to determine the relationship between them and the factors that measure success in achieving this goal. Consequently, it is seen that facilitators are positively and barriers are negatively associated with success criterias. It was seen that the most important dimension among the barriers was the financial dimension, the most important dimension among the facilitators was the management dimension and the most important expression among the success criterias was competitiveness. It is also observed that efforts to eradicate barriers and consolidate facilitators are positively effect transformation efforts to Third Generation Universities.