RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP VISION DEVELOPMENT AND ETHICS

Triple Helix principles and cultural barriers in a post-transition business environment 395
The first element of Triple Helix means the components included in this collaboration:
the institutional spheres of University, Industry and Government. These three factors are functioning
in Albania and their performance from year to year, has been increasing. There is a
large number of state and private universities in Albania. Some of them are well known in
the country for quality of teaching, research centers, scientific activities etc. On the other hand,
the industry has undergone an upward momentum after 1990. Free market economy caused
the privatization of main sectors. There are approximately 1,000 large companies and more
than 3000 SME operating in Albania. Finally, government institutions, because of political
changes, corruption, poverty, unemployment, etc., have a moderate improvement of their performance
level.
The second element concerns the relationship between these three components. This relationship
appears to be relatively difficult to realize due to the impact of insulation culture prevailing
in the internal organizational environments. Universities seem to be more interested
to develop such a trilateral cooperation but the impact of organizational culture is still an open
challenge. What we can say with certainty is that there is a considerable improvement of bilateral
cooperation such as university-business and university-government. Business-government
collaboration remains highly problematic, especially during the last two years where the change
of the tax structure has fostered a high level of dissatisfaction among businesses.