This study set out to establish entrepreneurship patterns in selected African universities and examine their potentials for institutional entrepreneurial transformation. The idea of the synergistic potential of entrepreneurship patterns with entrepreneurial university (EPU) concept influenced us. Our institutional sample comprised eight universities from three African sub-regions. We undertook document reviews, conducted forty-nine interviews and used content analysis. We found and established nine patterns, designed a holistic framework for the patterns and analyzed the dynamics and potentials. This synergistic approach, which is still marginal in the EPU literature, seemed truly relevant in the studied developing countries. Rather than borrowing pathways, the holistic framework addresses more effectively the different governance systems, meanings, resource mobilization processes, development contexts and business practices around the African universities. The framework constitutes a mirror, drawing board and director of attention and awareness for planning, analysis, review and funding of entrepreneurship in the studied countries. The article has practical implications for university managers who have the role to stimulate institution-wide entrepreneurship and make strategic choices. The article provides clear theoretical input to the higher education management literature, especially entrepreneurship management in developing countries which do not possess the institutional characteristics that have led to EPUs in higher-income countries.

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Although access to higher education continues to be crucial for developing countries, higher education remains a corps of excellence with selectivity as one of its operational dynamics. Even if higher education were to be fully massified everywhere, some of its functions and objectives would remain elitist and more strategic and may often require very tough choices on the part of administrators and managers of higher education. This situation suggests the inevitability of differential concentration of funds and the enhancement mechanisms for the priorities, one of which can be represented by performance-based funding. In this article, we examine a funding scheme, the Staff Development Grant at the University of Buea, Cameroon which employed performance-funding instruments as a means of boosting the university"s teaching and research profile, a strategic priority at the time. The results suggest that performance-based funding could have important positive implications in stimulating the responsiveness of other strategic objectives of higher education in the country"s context.

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