Higher education institutions (HEIs), once considered among society’s most resilient institutions, are facing challenges due to changes in governments’ and society’s expectations of them. Within the sector, there is a global call for new models and practices, requiring HEIs to develop the management capabilities once reserved for businesses. In this sense, they will pave entrepreneurial pathways and contribute to economic, technological and societal developments in their regions, thus adding a third mission (engaging socio-economic needs and market demands) to the traditional two (education and research) and transforming themselves into more entrepreneurial institutions. Dynamic capabilities enable transformation processes by allowing the dynamic sensing and seizing of opportunities and risks and the promotion of iterative change and reconfiguration. Scholars have called on HEIs to develop such dynamic capabilities in order to transform themselves and better respond to their sector’s challenges. Nevertheless, the understanding of how dynamic capabilities might advance HEIs’ third mission is still an underexplored concept, and in this paper, we propose mechanisms that promise to transform dynamic capabilities into third mission advancement. We have developed numerous theoretically grounded hypotheses and tested them with a partial least squares structural equation model into which we funnelled data collected from key decision-makers at German HEIs. The results suggest that dynamic capabilities do indeed influence third mission advancement; however, this relationship is mediated by the role of leadership and organisational agreement on vision and goals.

高等教育机构 (HEIs) 曾经被认为是社会最具韧性的机构之一，但由于政府和社会对其期望的变化而面临挑战。在该行业内，全球都在呼唤新的模式和实践，要求高等教育机构发展曾经为企业保留的管理能力。从这个意义上说，他们将为他们所在地区的经济、技术和社会发展铺平创业道路，从而为传统的两个使命（教育和研究）增加第三个使命（参与社会经济需求和市场需求），并将自己转变为更多的创业机构。动态能力通过允许动态感知和抓住机会和风险以及促进迭代变化和重新配置来实现转型过程。学者们呼吁高等教育机构发展这种动态能力，以实现自我转型并更好地应对所在行业的挑战。尽管如此，对动态能力如何推进高等教育机构的第三次任务的理解仍然是一个未充分探索的概念，在本文中，我们提出了有望将动态能力转变为第三次任务推进的机制。我们已经提出了许多基于理论的假设，并使用偏最小二乘结构方程模型对其进行了测试，我们将从德国高等教育机构的关键决策者那里收集的数据汇集到该模型中。结果表明，动态能力确实会影响第三次任务的推进；然而，这种关系是由领导的作用和组织对愿景和目标的共识来调节的。