The role of universities’ social responsibility in enhancing business sustainability: Mediating role of entrepreneurial culture

In the context of globalization of the educational services market, competition between universities is becoming more intense. This manifests itself, among other things, in the struggle for positions in international university rankings. Given that universities are evaluated according to many criteria in such rankings, it becomes necessary to identify the most significant factors in determining their positions.
This study aims to identify the key factors determining the world’s leading universities’ leadership in international university rankings. The numerical values of the criteria for compiling the QS World University Rankings (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE) rankings were an empirical basis for the study. The analysis covered the Top 50 universities (according to the QS ranking) and was conducted based on reports for 2020 and 2021.
At first, clustering was carried out (method – k-means); the data set was the combination of numerical values of QS and THE criteria (six and five criteria, respectively). The universities were divided into three clusters in 2020 (23, 19, 8 universities) and 2021 (23, 17, 10 universities). This showed the universities’ leadership relative to each other for each year.
At the second stage, classification processing was performed (method – decision trees). As a result, criteria combinations that give an absolute separation of all clusters (2020 – five combinations; 2021 – eight combinations) were identified. The obtained combinations largely determine universities’ affiliation to clusters; their criteria are recognized as key factors of their leadership in the rankings. This study’s results can serve as guidelines for improving universities’ positions in the rankings.

Strengthening the integration of higher education, research, and innovation is a crucial requirement of time. The entrepreneurial university today is considered and analyzed as a promising model for their combination. The educational and scientific systems of many countries are faced with the task of converging all vertices of the “knowledge triangle.” The problem of Ukrainian educational and scientific system is a necessity to implement the concept of formation of the innovation and entrepreneurial model of a modern university, which will enable the effective implementation of administrative reforms in this field. The article aims to analyze the impact of innovative environmental factors on the development of entrepreneurial universities in Ukraine, based on correlation and panel regression analysis. The method of quantitative analysis (panel regression) is used to formulate the key results of the article. The results show that the growth of government expenditures by 1% leads to an increase in the Global Innovation Index by 0.375 in 4 years. Also, every additional 1% of people working with new technologies increases the level of Global Innovation Index by 0.75 annually. Despite European trends, Ukrainian educational environment does not contribute to the development of innovation and entrepreneurial universities (the education expenditures are ineffective). The research provides a vector for understanding the implementation of the most effective strategies of promising innovation and investment development of education and science in Ukrainian universities, considering their existing potential and contemporary world trends of development.

Addressing the imbalance between the existing demand for graduates of higher education institutions is aimed at strengthening the processes of integrating the education system with the business. At the same time, issues related to the system of forming and determining the appropriate forms and types of partnership between universities and business in Ukraine are becoming more urgent. That’s why the purpose of this study is to develop a methodical approach to the formation and adaptive use of forms of such interaction. A comparative marketing analysis of the national and world experience of the forms and methods of interaction between educational institutions and business is carried out. A methodical approach to the formation of interaction between higher education institutions and the business has been proposed. The directions and types of public private тpartnership in education are formed, the basis of which is the distribution of rights, responsibilities and risks between the partners of the relations. Depending on the changes in the external conditions of marketing functioning, there is a list of standard (universal) forms of interaction between universities and the business environment that make up the invariant core of such interaction and innovation-active (specific) forms that arise in connection with the expansion of university autonomy. The three-component model of the choice of the form of interaction between higher educational institutions and the business structures in Ukraine is proposed, which allows choosing the form that will be optimal considering the existing conditions.