The Third Role of Universities

The third role of universities

1 Conceptual framework

The role of universities has evolved over the last 20 years. Where once largely focused on teaching and research within a universal community of knowledge creating institutions, universities are adopting a third role in regional economic development, which can also be described as “community service”, “regional engagement” (Holland 2001), “regional innovation organisation” and “academic entrepreneurialism” (OECD 1999). Knowledge and innovation have become increasingly important sources of national economic differentiation, and innovation processes require collaboration between actors in different spheres. There is a pressure from government, businesses and communities for universities to align their core functions with regional needs (Chatterton and Godard 2000).

From a regional perspective, universities appear to be increasingly viewed as an economic asset especially because, unlike firms, they are relatively permanent institutions and therefore “safer” for development policy measures (see Srinivas and Viljamaa 2008). Universities are‘systems of established and prevalent social rules thatstructure social interactions’ (Hodgson, 2006, p. 2).

The third role calls for universities to transform themselves into economic institutions by taking on specific tasks such as greater technology transfer, more patenting, visible employment, and commercial outputs.

The role of universities in regional development can be categorised using thegenerativeand developmental categories (see Gunasekara 2004). These categories, which are notmutually exclusive, may be articulated with referenceto four key elements of a regional system,as found in the literature on regional systems andon the new regionalism. These elements are:

1)the spatial agglomeration of firms and otherorganisations in a bounded geographical space, ina single industry, or complementary industries;

2)theavailability of a stock of proximate capital, particularly,human capital;

3)an associative governance regime;

4)the development of cultural norms ofopenness to learning, trust and cooperation between firms.

In regard tothe role that universities perform in regionalinnovation systems, there are two dominant approachesto conceptualisation. These two approaches—the triple helix model of university, industry,government relations (Etzkowitz 2002; Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 1997, 1999)and the literature on the engaged university—overlap, but also manifest some important differences in emphasis.

1)The triple helix model sharpened the focus on the roleof universities in regional economies, pointing tothe anticipation of hybrid university, industry, government relationships that involved the multiplicationof resources and capital formation projects,such as real estate development in science parks and firm formation in incubator facilities.

–The model posits that universities adopt a generative role in driving regional economic development, through academic entrepreneurial activities that overlap with the traditional roles of industry and the state in economic regulation.

–This model conceptualiseda non-linear, interactive approach to innovationas a recursive overlap of interactions andnegotiations among universities, industry andgovernment. Akey insight offered by this model is the hybrid,recursive, cross-institutional nature of relationsamong the three helices.

–The institutional spheresof the state, the university and industry were formerlyseparate entities that interacted acrossstrongly defended boundaries. Increasingly, individualsand organisations within the helices aretaking other roles than were traditionally ascribedto them.

–There is a shift from training individual students towards a focus on groups, in organisational settings. Universities increasingly “train organisations” through teaching-based incubators that integrate entrepreneurial education and firm formation.

2)The literature on the engaged universityputs emphasis onadaptive responses by universities, which embed astronger regional focus in their teaching andresearch missions.

–While accepting that universities may well undertake generative activities, it proposes that they adopt a broader, developmental focus on adapting their core functions of teaching and research, as well as community service, to address regional needs.

–Universities, throughtheir resource base of people, skills and knowledge, increasingly, play a significant role inregional networking and institutional capacitybuilding. Staff, either in formal or informalcapacities, may act as “regional animators”throughrepresentation on outside bodies ranging fromschool governing boards and local authorities tolocal cultural organisations and developmentagencies. As such, universities make an indirectcontribution to the social and cultural basis ofeffective regional governance.

–The university engagement approach, therefore,points to a developmental role performed by universitiesin regional economic and social developmentthat centres on the intersection of learningeconomies and the regionalisation of productionand regulation.

–Regionally-focused teaching is manifest in a stronger focus on regional student recruitment and graduate retention, the development of programs that address skills required by regional industries and the localisation of learning processes.

Table I summarises the nature of the two types of roles universities perform with reference to the four key elements of regional systems.

Source: Gunasekara (2004)

Table II indicates a number of institutional and economic factors that shape the role that universities perform in the development of regional innovation systems. These factors will vary between institutions and there may be additional factors that are peculiar to one or more institutions.

Source: Gunasekara (2004)

2 Case studies

2.1 The cases of three Australian non core-metropolitan universities

The case studies centred on

• a peri-urban university, located in a predominantly services-oriented regional economy (University of Western Sydney),
• a provincial city university located in a region dominated by manufacturing, but in transition towards a services industry base (University of Wollongong) and
• a rural university located in an agricultural region (CharlesSturtUniversity, Riverina campus).

The case studies involved

• semi-structured interviews with university managers, academic staff, managers of university engagement activities, representatives of local authorities, government agencies, regional coordination bodies, peak business and industry bodies and forms and other organisations that had participated in university engagement initiatives.
• an extensive review of documentation, including strategic plans of universities, annual reports, government reports relating to universities’ human capital formation activities, other published reports, non-published reports and papers, as well as documentation relating to the composition of, and key initiatives within, the regions.

University of Western Sydney

The UWS performed a developmental role, which was evident in its distinctive contribution to tertiary participation and in the adaptation of a number of education programs to align with regional needs, notably, in health and education. Less attention had been paid to the development of education programs that addressed specific regional industry needs, notably in the predominant SME base.

Regional issues shaped the delivery of health education programs, and education programs were grounded in the development needs of the region, through close linkages with the public education sector. There was little evidence of localisation of education programs linked to the knowledge needs of private industry.

An important issue, to be addressed in regard to SMEs, is the need to bridge the gap between tertiary education and the labour market. SMEs generally require graduates to have acquired key transferable skills through their studies and work-based education.

University of Wollongong

The UOW performed an emerging generative role in its proximate region, and its key contributions were twofold:

• student recruitment remains, primarily, from the proximate region
• it was seeking to integrate teaching and research through industry-linked grants, research centres and an innovation campus that involved the co-location of university researchers and firms in the IT&T industry.

A shift toward a stronger entrepreneurial focus, symbolised in the development of an Innovation Campus, was linked to a more embedded approach to teaching, which supported regional clustering and, potentially, new firm formation. Collaborative research projects were seen as vehicles for embedding teaching. Thus, CRCs engaged a number of postgraduate students who were jointly supervised by university academics and industry staff.

The UOW’s linkages with key firms in the region, in part, centred on enterprise-based research projects undertaken by postgraduate students, jointly supervised, as well as the development of opportunities for company staff to teach into UOW programs and for the university staff to provide a significant component of technical training to firms. The university developed informal and formal relationships with a range of key actors in the regional governance institutional set-up, centred on leadership of a regional innovation strategy.

While there was evidence of the integration of teaching and research, a linkage between education and academic entrepreneurial activities was lacking, as envisaged in the triple helix literature. There was some evidence of this linkage in the Innovation Centre.

A modest contribution to addressing local business needs was the Student Leadership and Business Development Program, which has been implemented with financial and in-kind support by a major business peak body in the region. It offers students an opportunity to undertake a workplace-based research project that contributes to a specific need in a local organisation as well as providing practical skills development for the students.

There is a weakness in the university’s ability to capture the commercial benefits of the knowledge bases that it had created, or co-created.

Charles Sturt University, Riverina campus

CSU performs a distinctive developmental role consistent with the university engagement literature. It supports technology transfer in the rice, viticulture and wine making industries in its region, through the provision of undergraduate, postgraduate and industry-oriented education programs that are used to disseminate research results from collaborative research projects conducted in CRCs. Some academics were sceptical because it was difficult to attract industry participation, particularly, established producers.

The university’s Continuing and Professional Education Centre brokers the development of customised education programs to meet corporate needs in the region, for example, in business banking, IT for SMEs, and health service assistance for hospital and community health staff.

CSU have determined to infuse its educational programs with a consistent regional flavour, which would provide students with a broader perspective and improve their flexibility to practice in a variety of locations.

Summary of the case studies

The three universities tended to perform a developmental role in regional innovation systems, consistent with the university engagement literature. That is, the universities tended to focus on adapting their traditional roles in teaching and research to support regional needs, rather than re-positioning their roles relative to industry and the state in driving development, through knowledge capitalisation and other capital formation projects centring on academic entrepreneurialism.

The case studies highlighted a number of differences in the initiatives that pointed to either developmental or generative roles performed by the universities. For example, while all three of the universities were undertaking knowledge creation activities that were directed to industry needs, the institutional forms within which the (emerging) generative role performed by the UOW were manifest (that is, the technology precinct and science park, as well as strategy leadership and the integration of teaching and research, which were embedded in capital formation projects) was qualitatively different from the other two cases.

The nature of the roles performed by the universities was path-dependent.The case studies also indicated that the developmental and generative roles did not appear to sit on a continuum. The nature of the role performed by a university is not necessarily evolutionary, but, perhaps, is mediated by unique sets of historical, institutional and cultural factors.

2.2 The cases of two Finnish universities

The research focused in particular on the role of two specific universities and their involvement in the creation of “BioTurku”, the city’s high-tech concentration (Srinivas and Viljamaa 2008). The primary data consisted of

• detailed interviews and analysis of industry statistics,
• national, regional, and city government policy documents,
• previous studies about the development of industrial activities in Turku.

Today, there are two major universities in Turku: the University of Turku and Abo Akademi. The university-industry cooperation has arisen through a complex process of economic institutionalization and with no clear strategy or goal orientation at the outset by policy-makers or academics, universities or firms. More important were six separate strands of institutional growth, selection and linkages, most of which were accompanied by resource constraints and pressures to collaborate:

state-driven model / the state has played a remarkable role in building biotechnology capacity in Turku, with the aim of making biotechnology the “fourth pillar” of Finnish industry
older companies and their university-oriented push / the background of the biotechnology industry in Turku and in Finland can be traced to the development of the domestic pharmaceutical industry
pharmaceutical companies started R&D bases and cooperated to some university groups and departments
companies hired in university researchers or had in-house corporate researchers with an open attitude to working with universities
recession and crisis / in the 1990s the national recession and fiercer global competition resulted in a slow decline in Turku’s economic base
Turku losted its Soviet generic drugs markets
attention turned to the emerging biotechnology cluster
rise of regional development initiatives / due to the changes in the national science and technology policy, public funding increased significantly
local initiatives to increase Turku’s visibility in terms of biotechnology activities
biotechnology is also a branch in “city marketing”
individual mobilization / the universities were not the primary drivers to link up with industry but the scientists were
a small but active network of individuals had a large effect on improving the competitiveness of new pharmaceutical companies and on mobilizing new policy activities to support the local clusters
reappearance of universities with a muffled regional mandate / in Turku, older biotechnology has merged with newer forms and the strengths of the last 50 years still define current competencies and reputation
a further recent boost to industry has occurred in modern biotechnology with strong academic linkages to the USA

The Centre for Biotechnology is a university unit established in cooperation between the two universities. Its major functions:

• research, training, education;
• providing technical expertise and coordinating services and equipment for academic and industrial projects;
• providing a forum for active interactions between academia and industry.

BioCity is based on the idea to provide links between industry and academia by gathering a critical mass of researchers in different fields along with technical resources and possible company partners – new facilities (laboratories) were established and jointly administrated by the two universities. BioCity is an umbrella organisation which structures collaboration, resource sharing and infrastructure development in research and education with a community that consists of over 50 research groups and over 500 people working mainly on cell and molecular biology and other biotechnologies.

Turku Science Park is the hub of biotechnology innovation and is laid out in a small area next to the university campuses. It encompasses a dense setting of corporations, university laboratories, public-sector science and technology, venture-capital agencies, as well as catering facilities. Its goal, through organizations such as TurkuBioValley, is to provide support for the entire “innovation chain” from invention to production through the “branded” concept, or share vision of a “BioTurku”, a new conceptualization of a high-tech Turku region.

Hypotheses about the third role of universities:

H1: the third role for research-intensive universities historically emerges from individual action and rarely from a university-wide organizational mandate. Appropriate metrics would thus become necessary to separate strands of individual versus university-wide action, and how in many cases one has led to the other.

H2: rapid industrialization and technological changes in Finland forced universities to take on new roles in contrast with other countries where university-state-industry-citizen relations have perhaps had longer time frames to evolve.

H3: individual action from within the university influences its social role, and it constrains and enables behaviour at the level of the organization. Thus, university-specific mission and leadership emerge not as stand-along policy concepts, but as a means of understanding individual versus organizational behaviour and impact.

H3.1: to the extent that cultural specializations also exist (e.g. regional arts and culture, or technologies specific to the region), these may shape university missions in different ways from those universities dealing with more generic technical specializations

H4.: the third roles are sector/technology-specific

H5: in countries with centrally coordinated innovation policies, non-capital city-regions have substantially different third role histories and policy options than capital cities

References

Gunasekara, Chrys S. (2004) The Third Role of Australian Universities in Human Capital Formation. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 26(3):pp. 329-343.

Srinivas, Smita and Viljamaa, Kimmo (2008) Emergence of Economic Institutions: Analysingthe Third Role of Universities in Turku, Finland, Regional Studies, Vol. 42.3, pp. 323–341, April 2008

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development(1999) The Response ofHigher Education Institutions to Regional Needs. Centre for Educational Research andInnovation (CERI/IMHE/DG(96)10/REVI), OECD, Paris.

Holland, BA (2001) Toward a definition and characterization of the engaged university, Metropolitan Universities, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 20-9.

Chatterton P. and Goddard J. (2000) The response of higher education institutions to regional needs, European Journalof Education 35, 475–496.

Etzkowitz H. (2002) MIT and the Rise of Entrepreneurial Science, Routledge, London.

Etzkowitz, H and Leydesdorff, L (1999) The Future Location of Research and Technology Transfer, Journal of Technology Transfer, vol. 24, pp. 111-23.

Etzkowitz, H and Leydesdorff, L (1997) Introduction: Universities in the Global Knowledge Economy, in H Etzkowitz and LLeydesdorff (eds), Universities and the Global Knowledge Economy: a Triple Helix ofUniversity-Industry-Government Relations, Pinter, London and Washington, pp. 1-8.

Hodgson G. (2006) What are institutions?, Journal of Economic Issues 40, 1–25.

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