Mapping the Role of European Universities of Applied Sciences as Entrepreneurial Hubs of Regional Development

The chapter focuses on mapping and analysing regional engagement of universities of applied sciences through an institutional self-reflection tool which is developed within the international project UASiMAP and which aims to be useful at institutional level as well as to highlight the important role of this specific area of HE activities. The tool should serve not only for immediate self-evaluation but also to inform institutional improvement and dynamics. The authors define UAS as a specific entrepreneurial hub for regional development and propose a multidimensional model for reflection of the UAS role in regional development. Opportunities, challenges, and limits of the model´s individual dimensions are discussed in two ways: firstly, as reflections of relevant literature and, secondly, using the practical experiences of project partners from different European countries as arguments for the proposed dimension(s). A strategy for assessing progress using the proposed model and criteria for indicators are presented and discussed.

Understanding the Regional Engagement of Universities from a Stakeholders’ Perspective: The Case of the University of Thessaly, Greece

International literature pays vast attention to the role and the regional engagement of universities as a facilitator of sustainable regional development. Most papers use top-down approaches by looking at how well conceptual models of a university’s role fit any case study considered or by measuring predefined dimensions of university engagement. The present paper prioritizes the stakeholder views and provides a framework for revealing the critical dimensions of the university’s regional engagement from a bottom-up perspective. The region of Thessaly is selected as a case study, and the university’s engagement is conceptualized by a four-dimensional framework that considers the university’s contributions, student roles, beneficiaries, and barriers. Then, through a survey, relevant items are provided to stakeholders to formulate any potential engagement factors. The factors are extracted using the principal component analysis, and then the consensus of different stakeholders on their response patterns is then also evaluated with relevant statistical tests. In practical terms, the analysis shows that a capable number of factors could be formulated under each dimension of the framework and that there are not many significant differences in stakeholder perceptions, regardless of their institutional role. In theoretical terms, the identified factors may act as a baseline for any future relevant evaluation.

Revisiting Integrated Coastal and Marine Management in Canada: Opportunities in the Bay of Fundy

Limited progress has been made in implementing integrated coastal and marine management (ICM) policies globally. A renewed commitment to ICM in Canada offers an opportunity to implement lessons from previous efforts over the past 20 years. This study applies three core ICM characteristics identified from the literature (formal structures; meaningful inclusion; and, innovative mechanisms) to identify opportunities for operationalizing ICM from participants’ lived experiences in Atlantic Canada. These characteristics are employed to assess and compare ICM initiatives across two case studies in the Upper Bay and the Lower Bay of Fundy. The assessments are based on semi-structured interviews conducted with key participants and a supplementary document analysis. The following insights for future ICM policies were identified: adaptive formal structures are required for avoiding previous mistakes; a spectrum of approaches will support meaningful engagement in ICM; local capacity is needed for effective innovative mechanisms; and, policy recommendations should be implemented in parallel. Although these insights are relevant to each of the two sub-regional case studies, the paths taken to incorporating and realizing them appear to be location-specific. To account for these site-specific differences, we suggest more attention be given to strategies that incorporate local history, unique capacity of actor groups and location-specific social-ecological systems objectives. We provide the following recommendations on policy instruments to assist in moving toward enhanced regional ICM in the Bay of Fundy, and that may also be transferable to international ICM efforts: update policy statements to incorporate lessons from previous experiences; strengthen commitment to ICM in Federal law; create a regional engagement strategy to enhance involvement of local actor groups; and, enhance the role of municipal governments to support local capacity building and appropriate engagement of local actors in ICM processes.

Regional engagement in Mozambique will face obstacles

Headline MOZAMBIQUE: Regional engagement will face obstacles

Promoting academic engagement in regions: How individual and contextual factors shape engagement activities

The need to harness knowledge to improve the innovativeness and economic development of regions has brought the regional role of universities to the fore of academic and policy discourses. Being producers and disseminators of knowledge, policymakers and societal actors expect universities to contribute to the knowledge needs of the regions in which they are located. These include exchanging knowledge with regional partners, provision of requisite human capital for local industries as well as offering place leadership. Even though universities are located in regions, they nonetheless engage with diverse stakeholders in several activities at multiple territories. Hence, universities balance a variety of roles to provide benefits to all their stakeholders. While trying to meet the needs of their multiple stakeholders, most universities — perhaps in response to policy pressures — have developed strategies and policies aimed at deepening engagement in their regions. Although universities, as institutions, are expected to lead regional engagement, academics remain the agents that engage with external actors in practice. Academics need to perform other work roles in addition to engaging with regional actors. These competing demands make the effective fulfilling of the regional engagement role challenging. Amidst these tensions, there is a need to understand whether and how academics engage with regional actors and the factors that influence such engagement. However, most prior studies on the topic have focused on the university and have largely ignored the individual academic. This limits understanding of the behavior of academics toward regional engagement and affects the design of effective policies. Accordingly, the overall goal of this thesis is to provide new insights on the role of individual and contextual factors in academics’ regional engagement. This thesis is a synthesis of four papers that together contribute to answering the overall research question. It uses both quantitative and qualitative research methods to investigate regional engagement from the perspective of academics and firms in different empirical contexts. These variety of methods enrich the analyses and provide deeper insights into the phenomenon. The findings generally demonstrate that both individual and firm-related factors remain important drivers of regional engagement, while university-related factors matter less. Specifically, individual motivations are important for the external engagement of academics. However, different motivations become more salient at specific career stages. Career motivation is more important at the early career stage, while pecuniary motivation matters most at the late career stage. Prosocial motivation remains more important at the midcareer stage. Also, the embeddedness of academics in both formal and informal social networks facilitates knowledge transfer and regional engagement. Moreover, academics’ attachment to place tends to increase their engagement activities with regional actors. However, there are some variations in the effect of place attachment and informal social networks on regional engagement between native and non-native academics. Place attachment is important for both groups, while informal social networks matter only for native academics. Furthermore, the findings show that regional firms’ knowledge strategies increase the likelihood of firms to collaborate with university partners. Lastly, the perception of organizational fairness has a limited or no effect on the external engagement of academics. The findings from the thesis contribute primarily to the academic engagement and the university-industry collaboration literatures with new insights on the factors driving academic engagement. The study extends place attachment and organizational justice theories to explain the underlying mechanisms of the external engagement behavior of academics. Besides the theoretical contribution, the findings also provide insights to guide practitioners and policymakers in designing policies to promote regional engagement. In particular, university managers should pay attention to career development policies. Because academics’ external engagement is chiefly influenced by career motivations, rewards and incentives for external engagement should be geared towards helping academics progress in their careers. Also, policies seeking to promote university-industry collaboration should target firms more than universities. Policymakers need to provide incentives that motivate firms to develop cooperative partnerships with universities.

Universities and Place Leadership: a question of agency and alignment

There is increasing interest in the question of how different stakeholders develop, implement and lead regional upgrading processes with the concept of place leadership emerging as one response to this. Simultaneously, universities face growing expectations that they will contribute to regional development processes – often through their collaborative relationships with other regional stakeholders. But universities are complex in terms of their internal and institutional structures, which undermines their capacities to enact coherent place leadership roles. We seek to understand how strategic leadership in universities can contribute to innovation and regional development in the context of the fundamental institutional complexity of universities. We address this through a qualitative, explorative case study comparing six European regions where universities have sincerely attempted to deliver place leadership roles. We identify that the elements of agency and alignment are vital in that: firstly, university leadership has to align with regional coalitions on the one hand and internal structures on the other hand, and secondly, this leadership must give individuals agency in their regional engagement activities.