The Role of Universities in Regional Development: Conceptual Models and Policy Institutions in the UK,Sweden and Austria

The literature on universities’ contributions to regional development is broad and diverse. A precise understanding of how regions may draw advantages from various university activities and the role of public policy institutions in promoting such activities is still missing. The aim of this paper is to provide a framework for analysing universities’ contributions to regional economic and societal development in differing national contexts and the policy institutions that underpin them. To do this, we review four conceptual models: the entrepreneurial university model, the regional innovation system (RIS) model, the mode 2 university model and the engaged university model. The paper demonstrates that these four models emphasize very different activities and outputs by which universities are seen to benefit regional economy and society. It is also shown that these models differ markedly with respect to the policy implications and practice. Analysing some of the public policy imperatives and incentives in the UK, Austria and Sweden, the paper highlights that in the UK, policies encourage all four university models. In contrast, in Sweden and Austria, policy institutions tend to privilege the RIS university model, whilst at the same time, there is some evidence for increasing support of the entrepreneurial university model.     

University–Regional Partnership in a Period of Structural Adjustment: Lessons from Southern Adelaide's Response to an Automobile Plant Closure

This paper examines some of the issues that arise out of partnerships between universities and regions. It draws upon the experience of Flinders University in working with a range of regional agents in responding to the closure of the Mitsubishi Motors Australia Limited (MMAL) plant at Lonsdale in Adelaide's southern suburbs. The paper suggests that there are a number of hurdles to the establishment of effective partnerships that include: the perception that universities behave in ways that are different to either public or private sector organizations; the absence of universities from the networks and communication protocols central to the work of economic development practitioners; the sporadic nature of university engagement with regional issues; and, the gap between university funding models and local economic aspirations. The paper also finds that government-established mechanisms for regional development may be flawed, especially if they are dominated by representatives of the public sector. The research concludes that current policy preoccupations with the development of commercially valuable intellectual property results in a heavy discounting of other economic impacts. Finally, the paper argues that a pathway for effective engagement between universities and their regions can be established, but such initiatives require considerable time, patience and understanding on the part of all parties. Periods of regional economic stress may not be the most appropriate periods for establishing these working relationships.     

Higher Education Excellence and Local Economic Development: The Case of the Entrepreneurial University of Twente

By tradition or intellectual necessity, universities pursue a main objective: increasing and transferring knowledge that is internationally relevant for the whole of mankind. But new powerful socio-economic forces are demanding universities to be engaged in regional economic development and their knowledge to be relevant in terms of local employment, university spin-offs and growth. These two objectives are traditionally considered as not complementary or even mutually exclusive. Through a case study regarding the Dutch University of Twente, this article shows that local economic relevance and international excellence are not incompatible objectives: they were not at the University of Twente; they can be reached even in a new born and poor endowed university, located in a peripheral, depressed and not industrialized countryside. This article argues that a strong entrepreneurial vision and the adoption of a different concept of knowledge may be the key for other small and peripheral European universities, in order to reach both local economic relevance and international excellence. The article will contribute and enrich the regional studies debate, introducing to it some higher education policy issues and ideas.     

Wishful thinking? Towards a more realistic role for universities in regional innovation policy

ABSTRACT

The past 30 years has seen an escalating interest in the potential role of universities in contributing to their regional economies, reflected in the increasing trend for regional innovation strategies to ascribe a central role for universities, particularly in peripheral, institutionally thin places. The global economic crisis and subsequent austerity measures implemented in many developed economies have put further pressure on universities from national and regional policymakers to become more explicitly involved in contributing to their local economies in order to justify their public funding. This paper will draw on the academic literature to consider how justified this focus is by questioning whether universities are willing or even able to play the roles expected of them in contributing to regional innovation. It will critique an approach to policymaking that often views universities as homogenous actors in the regional innovation system and places an over reliance on imitating success stories from other places without sufficient consideration of the specificities of local conditions. It will argue for a more realistic and nuanced approach to involving universities in regional innovation policy, concluding with key insights for both universities and policymakers.     

How street-level dilemmas and politics shape divergence: The accountability regimes framework

Hierarchical accountability often proves insufficient to control street-level implementation, where complex, informal accountability relations prevail and tasks must be prioritized. However, scholars lack a theoretical model of how accountability relations affect implementation behaviors that are inconsistent with policy. By extending the Accountability Regimes Framework (ARF), this paper explains how multiple competing subjective street-level accountabilities translate into policy divergence. The anti-terrorism “Prevent Duty” policy in the United Kingdom requires university lecturers to report any student they suspect may be undergoing a process of radicalization. We ask: what perceived street-level accountabilities and dilemmas does this politically contested policy imply for lecturers, and how do they affect divergence? An online survey of British lecturers (N = 809), combined with 35 qualitative follow-up interviews, reveals that accountability dilemmas trigger policy divergence. The ARF models how street-level bureaucrats become informal policymakers in the political system when rules clash with their roles as professionals, citizen-agents, or “political animals.”     

The City as a Focus for Human Capital Migration: Towards a Dynamic Analysis of University Human Capital Contributions

Universities’ contributions to urban development frequently focus on their micro- or macro-scale effects, ignoring the meso-scale effects they have on inter-territorial relationships. Although universities are seen as an essential part of the recipe for successful urban development, there is a lacuna to understanding how they make places and shape urban hierarchies, and this article addresses this question. This article focuses on one university–urban development process, the creation and embedding of highly skilled graduates, to explore what the aggregate effects of universities on places are; it develops a set of indicators to measure graduate attraction and retention as well as the overall composite place effect. The article develops a typology based on these three indicator sets, and tests this using a data set developed from a Polish social media website. It finds that these indicators are a good way of measuring the effects of human capital creation and mobility at the urban scale. The article concludes by arguing that a greater focus is required in studying the roles that universities play in fostering through-flow in places, changing these places’ nature as nodes within wider urban systems and hierarchies, in the context of university–regional development.     

How Necessary are Intermediary Organizations in the Commercialization of Research?

As universities around the world are under pressure to produce commercial outputs of their research results, it is surprising how a few studies have been conducted about intermediary organizations and their role in this matter. The intermediaries’ basic roles to diminish market and system failures in innovation processes are targeted to respond to the challenges that may emerge in innovation processes, in general, especially in the commercialization of academic research. In this article, we analyse the roles of, and needs for, different kinds of intermediary organizations in two Finnish technology agglomerations from the perspective of the commercialization of new knowledge. We use the Triple Helix concept as a theoretical starting point for our empirical analysis. As many challenges in Triple Helix linkages prove that policy interventions to support the activities of intermediary organizations are justified up to certain point. However, the role of these “go-between” actors may also be irrelevant if networks between university–firm–government helices function well. In addition, many of the challenges in the commercialization of new knowledge originated from the failures of policy implementation concerning the public or semi-public intermediaries.     

The Greek University Stranded in the Policy of Establishing Regional Universities

The paper examines the policy implemented when it comes to establishing regional universities in a developed, yet semi-peripheral, EU country (i.e. Greece) and focuses on two central issues: whether regional universities contribute to local development and whether their location in the periphery harnessed their academic performance. The establishment of regional universities has become a widely used practice for facilitating regional development throughout the developed world, and the university's third role is quite widely accepted. The paper does not intend to question the policy of establishing regional universities itself, but rather the way these universities were established in Greece (as a case of a semi-peripheral regime) and possibly in other countries that are not in the forefront of international research. Regional universities in Greece were often established for clientelistic reasons; however, they do contribute in advancing local economic growth. These positive effects on the locality are often accompanied by a high cost for the Greek university and society itself, in the sense that regional universities have often been forced to operate under difficult conditions, thus undermining their fundamental mission (educational but primarily research).     

Technology Transfer and Public Policy

This article uses events occurring between 1989 and 1994 at the University of California (UC) as a case study to illustrate the consequences to the university of the collision between two powerful public policy agendas for the university: (a) that it maintain its traditional independence, carrying out its roles of teaching and research untainted by the lures and demands of the marketplace, and (b) that it become more active in economic development activities, including the development and sale of its intellectual property and the establishment of companies to exploit university research. The unsuccessful attempts over these five years by the UC to establish a separate nonprofit foundation to manage its considerable portfolio of intellectual property and to form a for-profit company to fund development and start-up efforts have been plagued with controversy. UC's story offers parallels with the experiences of other universities and illustrates an emerging pattern in the responses of higher education to the new pressures on them to be more economically relevant. The lessons from the UC case are valuable for other universities and for policymakers involved in technology transfer activities.     

Is Good Policy Unimplementable? Reflections on the Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice

Despite the enormous energy devoted to generating the right policy models in development, strangely little attention is given to the relationship between these models and the practices and events that they are expected to generate or legitimize. Focusing on the unfolding activities of a development project over more than ten years as it falls under different policy regimes, this article challenges the assumption that development practice is driven by policy, suggesting that the things that make for ‘good policy’— policy which legitimizes and mobilizes political support — in reality make it rather unimplementable within its chosen institutions and regions. But although development practice is driven by a multi‐layered complex of relationships and the culture of organizations rather than policy, development actors work hardest of all to maintain coherent representations of their actions as instances of authorized policy, because it is always in their interest to do so. The article places these observations within the wider context of the anthropology of development and reflects on the place, method and contribution of development ethnography.     

University–Industry Knowledge Transfer and Network Patterns in Romania: Does Knowledge Supply Fit SMEs' Regional Profiles?

Universities' potential to contribute to regional value creation has been extensively discussed so far and significant literature has been devoted to celebrated cases in highly industrialized and developed countries. Assuming that it would be misleading to generalize from “exceptional” cases, some authors have focused their attention specifically on the influence of universities in less developed areas regions and countries, where university–industry relations are far from being a Triple Helix. This paper focuses on the mechanisms of university–industry knowledge transfer (KT) in Romania, a post-communist country with relatively weak regional innovation performances, except for the capital region Bucharest-Ilfov. The purpose of the study is to construct an index to compare university–industry KT across the eight Romanian regions. Data to be aggregated are collected from 90 Romanian higher education institutions and refer to their KT potential in terms of human, financial and relational inputs, outputs and outcomes (patent applications, new products and services, spin-offs and commercial income). Finally, universities' regional KT performances are compared to small and medium enterprises territorial patterns and issuing policy implications are discussed.     

Engagement,estrangement or divorce? The new universities and their communities in the 1960s

The new universities of the 1960s were innovatory, in their curricula, architecture, independence and academic ambitions. They also marked a different relationship between universities and their localities. For a century, new universities had been predicated on local demand, whereas the 1960s universities were conceived of as national institutions meeting a national demand. This new approach to university–civic connections was sudden, novel and contributed to a sense of remoteness attached to the new universities. This paper examines how the different policy was formulated, predominantly by the UGC, and considers some examples of how the policy played out in practice.     

More than just experts for hire: A conceptualization of the roles of consultants in public policy formulation

Consultants are increasingly a part of public policy formulation, and their policy involvement draws extensive interest in research and public debate. However, there is a gap in how we think about their formulation role: they are often conceptualized as a type of expert, while their actual interaction with and contribution to policy formulation is much more varied. This paper develops a conceptualization of consultants' formulation roles. It demonstrates that rather than just informing policy formulation, consultants take multiple roles and interact with policymaking and makers in multiple ways. Using a policy network/subsystem distinction and a substance/process distinction as the main axes for analysis, the paper develops four role categories: (1) experts and knowledge brokers, in which consultants provide policy advice and analysis; (2) seeing for the government, in which they construct a picture of the policy field; (3) legitimizers and validators, in which they provide symbolic capital to policy; and (4) channels for stakeholders' policy preferences, in which they manage deliberation and synthesize actors' policy preferences. The paper provides much-needed clarity on how consultants engage with policy formulation and policymakers and forwards our understanding of how consultants exert their policy influence.     

History and Policy Studies

This article deals with actual and potential contributions of history to policy studies. Some historians have attempted to influence specific policies through their writings, others have held policy-relevant positions in government agencies, while others have functioned in roles that have made them official preservers of our past. The authors discuss a number of ways in which history is relevant to policy studies-among them, the conception of history as a policy laboratory, as a source for perspective about the development of current policies, as a source of theoretically interesting rare or unique occurrences, and as a repository of values to which appeals can be made to justify current and proposed policies. Historians are becoming aware of the need for alternative careers to teaching in universities and this has led them to seek an increase in the number of policy-relevant positions for historians in government.     

Cultural Engineering Under Authoritarian Regimes: Islamization of Universities in Postrevolutionary Iran

The purpose of this article is to analyze the efforts that have been made to Islamize Iranian universities, specifically since the emergence of hardliners in 2005. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Islamic regime relentlessly intensified its efforts to Islamize universities to train a new generation of ideologically driven students. In the three decades following the Revolution, three major periods of university Islamization have been implemented. The Cultural Revolution, which started in 1980, was the first step in the Islamization of Iran's universities: to cleanse the higher education systems from students and professors who criticized the new established Islamic regime. By increasing the number of students and the development of universities throughout Iran in the Rafasanjai era, the second wave of the Islamization of the university was triggered by Ayatollah Khamenei in 1994. During the reform era, the Islamization of universities slowed because of the many confrontations between the Supreme Leader and the reformist administrations. With the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential election, the Islamization of universities intensified. While there are a few publications about the Islamization of universities, they mainly focused on the first and second decades following the 1979 Revolution. Focusing on the third period, this article will investigate the different strategies and tactics for the Islamization of universities, as well as reasons for its failures.     

中世纪欧洲大学生学习及生活费用的考察

大学日常生活史愈益为当代学者所关注。本文则主要对一位中世纪欧洲大学生的总花费及各项主要费用在其中所占的比例作了大致的估算。从总体来看,在中世纪欧洲各大学,膳宿费、获得学位所支出的各项费用和听课费占了大学生花费的绝大部分,而现代大学中学生每学年开学交纳的高额入学注册费在中世纪大学则微乎其微。而且,不同时代、不同地区、不同专业、不同阶层的大学生的花费亦有差别。大学通常本着贫富有别的原则收费,从而使贫富学生获得相对等同的教育机会,而教俗统治者和富人的捐资助学也为学生完成大学教育作出了贡献。可见,让贫穷学生进入大学并完成其学业可以不必通过降低收费标准,而是可以通过减免或免除其部分费用的方法来实现。但总的来看,在中世纪欧洲,就读大学的费用是昂贵的,绝大部分大学生仍然是占人口极少数的富有阶层的子弟。     

Three Ideas of the University

What is a university? In the nineteenth century John Henry Newman famously spoke of “the idea of a university.” This phrase has dominated all discussions of the nature of the university since. Most contemporary writers are against any attempt to theorise the university in terms of a single idea. But against the now standard view that universities should only be characterised empirically as institutions that perform many different activities, I attempt to defend the idea of the university, not by reviving a single idea of the university but by suggesting that there are, at root, three ideas of the university. These are rival ideas, and strictly incommensurable, though they often exist together in a state of tension in actual universities. I call them the eternal, the immortal, and the immediate ideas of the university.     

South African University history: a historiographical overview

University history has traditionally been the domain of the commemorative publication which presented institutions in a very favourable light, full of the boasts of growth and achievement. In considering university histories, it is useful to examine this traditional approach as well as more recent scholarly developments in the study of the history of institutions of higher learning internationally. In South Africa, most universities have some form of published history, although these vary greatly in scope, depth and critical approach. This article briefly considers volumes produced on South African universities and their past in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Trends and approaches evident in this wide variety of publications are highlighted. Questions such as the choice of moments of origin and commemoration, the effect of Apartheid on the retelling of the past and the use of either an autobiographical or a collaborative approach are considered. The comparative lack of histories of former ‘non-white’ universities is also explored, while the predominance of interest in matters of institutional identity in the post-Apartheid context is highlighted.     

Different Modes of Innovation and the Challenge of Connecting Universities and Industry: Case Studies of Two Regional Industries in Norway

The paper argues that no single formula exists for how universities can stimulate innovation activity and industrial development in a particular region. The type of university–industry cooperation must be fined-tuned according to the knowledge base of the university and to the dominant mode of innovation in the regional industry. This article discusses two different modes of innovation: science, technology, innovation (STI) and doing, using, interacting (DUI). The unit of analysis is innovation and cooperation with universities in two regional industries in Norway, which are dominated by the two modes of innovation: STI (marine biotechnology in Tromsø) and DUI (oil and gas equipment suppliers in Agder). The empirical analyses demonstrate the different roles that universities play in these two regional industries. The University of Tromsø is the main organization behind the development of the marine biotechnology industry in Tromsø and is an important knowledge node and source of biotechnology spin-offs. Equipment suppliers in Agder have become world leaders in some niches, almost without research cooperation with universities. A general lesson is that the dominant mode of innovation in a regional industry makes a difference to the role universities can play in stimulating the development of the industry.     

Interest Groups,Federalism, and Water Quality in the Great Lakes: Chasing a Moving Target

Federalism often creates additional decisions for interest groups in determining how best to advocate for their policy recommendations in the legislative process. Should they focus their advocacy at the local, state, or national level of government? This article examines interest group behaviors in water quality policy in the Great Lakes region from 1960 to 2000. I evaluate the reasons for interest group decisions about which level of government to target, using historical analysis of Great Lakes water quality policy in the United States and Canada. The results of this analysis show that in many cases groups are influenced in their decision-making based on the level of government that has the greatest jurisdiction over the policy, supporting a neoinstitutional argument.