Editorial for special issue on knowledge exchange and innovation in university city-regions

Citation

Abbott, C. and Powell, J.A. (2015), "Editorial for special issue on knowledge exchange and innovation in university city-regions", European Journal of Innovation Management, Vol. 18 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJIM-05-2015-0039

Editorial for special issue on knowledge exchange and innovation in university city-regions

Article Type: Guest editorial From: European Journal of Innovation Management, Volume 18, Issue 4.

In this special edition of the European Journal of Innovation Management we focus on knowledge exchange and innovation. In particular, the papers concentrate on those aspects of education and development that lead to improved innovation and specifically those which relate to industrial enterprise supported by universities throughout Europe.

Innovation has long been recognized as a key driver of economic development, new employment opportunities and wider well-being, but never has the focus on the importance of policy makers, businesses, universities and the wider community working together to foster innovation been so strong. Universities are considered as key drivers of growth, or as the “source of strength in the knowledge based economy in the 21st century” (Dearing, 2002) in contrast to the factories of the industrial age or the castles of medieval towns. In the higher education sector there is a growing attempt for universities to reach-out meaningfully to strategic external partners. This requires them to learn how to marshal new resources from a pluralism of sources because governments are no longer able, or willing, to financially support them to the full. Meanwhile businesses, both in the public and private sector, increasingly look to external sources of knowledge to maintain a competitive advantage. Together their aim is to generate innovative university-business collaborations, thus enabling them to flourish and create wealth for all.

Policy throughout Europe, as typified by EU Horizon 2020, is aimed at increasing this kind of collaboration. The nature of collaboration has also undergone significant change, from a linear view of knowledge transfer, to a multi-directional knowledge exchange view (Grinevich et al., 2008) and toward open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003) with an innovation ecosystem perspective. These factors combine to demand that we understand techniques which both grow our networks and then measure their effectiveness. At the same time the grand challenges that face society such as climate change, ageing populations, food security and security of energy supply are recognized as multi-disciplinary societal challenges that require a move beyond the triple helix concept (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000) of university, business and policy makers working in harmony toward a quadruple helix notion (Carayannis and Campbell, 2009) that engages and involves the wider community in collaboration. The EU’s response to the growing importance, with increasing, complexity of the innovation results in a Smart Specialization Strategy intended to “build competitive advantage by developing and matching research and innovation strengths” and by “involving national or regional managing authorities and stakeholder, such as universities and other higher education institutions, industry and social partners, in a collaborative entrepreneurial discovery process” (European Union, 2013).

Thus EU policies, strategies and a move toward a quadruple helix extend the conventional notions of the Bologna Process toward a European higher education area that engages business and the community in creative ways with respect to their learning and innovation, especially with partners who have found it difficult to engage with higher education in the past. Such collaborative engagements require academics themselves to become more entrepreneurial in the ways they reach out to new partners who are quite different from their traditional students. While there are many academics who may prefer to work in the traditional university ways of teaching and research, without considering the very different kinds of new learners or develop outreach projects, there is an increasing number of academics with trans-disciplinary skills and aptitudes who are both able and willing to collaborate on projects which create high-value improvements and impact in the real world and for local people. The Innopolis Project (www.knowledgecities.eu/) illustrated well the diverse range of good policy and practice in this regard that exists throughout Europe. It also underlines the possibility of learning from and transferring these practices, providing that we properly understand the context of the innovation ecosystem within which they exist.

Nevertheless there are significant challenges that exist in developing policy and practice for the future. While much good practice exists and the recognition of the importance of fostering innovation is growing, the context is increasingly difficult and complex (McGettigan, 2013). Reduced funding, and a focus on metric and measurement-based incentives and misaligned indicators create a tension. In the higher education sector there is therefore a growing attempt for universities to reach-out meaningfully to strategic external partners, marshalling new kinds of resource from a pluralism of sources now that existing providers no longer have requisite funding streams.

This edition of the journal has therefore brought together six papers which show different ways in which policy makers, academics, businesses and crucially the wider community, can work creatively with their external partners to enable higher impact of developed solutions and thus real improvements in society. The papers also suggest appropriate approaches to make such developments workable so that partner businesses, industries and the community can get the best from their academic enterprises.

Some of the papers are focussed toward senior academic leaders who must learn to recognize those of their staff with a real passion for co-creative working with business and the community, provide them with the support and coaching to ensure they can engage more innovatively with strategic external partners and reward them when they achieve success. Such improved managerial action should enable universities to become the leaders of new opportunities in the global knowledge economy; for while those academics interested in community outreach are typically self-motivated, they too now demand recognition and reward for successful effort. It is only if senior university leaders recognize the importance of complementary ways of working that European universities will properly diversify their approaches to deliver wealth creating solutions demanded by business and the community and thus develop new and relevant income streams for themselves which are so essential for their future growth, and those of their partners.

For businesses, the ability to actually cooperate and exchange knowledge between other businesses and support organizations dictates the need to learn how to manage their network settings in order to deal with competition based on the knowledge deployed within those networks. As part of this, intermediaries are positioned at the intersection of businesses and universities where knowledge creation can be promoted, by designating specific organizations to act as honest brokers to improve the prevailing situation by mediating the relationship between all parties. All parties must be seen increasingly in the context of open innovation. This issue is addressed in this edition of the journal by highlighting how structural developments of joint learning processes can afford beneficial social interaction between partners with very different motivations, backgrounds, goals and strengths.

At the same time, national and regional policy makers in their turn must also support those universities who want to reach out to business and the community in constructive ways. The first and last papers evidence successful policies that have been used to drive growth in this area of development; the first reporting success from the past and the last how we all need to change to be successful in the future. Taken as a whole, this journal issue provides a portfolio of simple, coherent and intuitive approaches – drivers for change – which can be applied to focus academics toward successful ways of engaging with business, industry, civil and voluntary services and other social settings for the benefit of all. Different but complementary approaches attempt to turn traditional academics into entrepreneurial ones by giving them a framework to drive more relevant and innovative academic engagement with a broad range of end user partners.

In particular, the papers describe successful policies, approaches and processes which highlight how academics must themselves learn how to acquire funds from plural resources and use a variety of innovation platforms and methods to achieve and normalize success. They also identify how different perspectives of innovation can underpin our understanding of the ways in which relevant models of innovation support the “stage management” of leading edge ideas into to the real world. They all point the way to how we might bring together successful elements of appropriate higher education for innovation and so herald a new academic approach to industry-university collaboration reflecting the changed world we now inhabit. n future, higher education must change and become the new innovation leader which focusses on: the co-identification of worthy academic enterprise problems; the co-design of solutions demanded by society reflecting the highest academic values; the co-production of new products and processes that are fit for purpose in order to create real and sustainable impact; and continuous improvement through the adoption of appropriate formative evaluation.

The first paper by Sheila Martin et al. entitled “The structure of policy-induced innovation networks in Slovenia” focusses on the constructive role which one government policy had in a country seeking to develop its innovation and enterprise capacity. The paper provides some general lessons to be learned for future innovation policy, particularly with regard to the importance of networks. The paper starts with a useful and comprehensive overview of strategic national higher education programmes in other countries which led the Republic of Slovenia to develop two important and interrelated policy documents which together combine to form the aptly named “Audacious Slovenia.” A key component of this is the Resolution on Research and Innovation Strategy of Slovenia (RISS) to improve the nation’s innovative capacity and to stimulate private-sector research and development. It does this by leveraging public investments in research and innovation, by cultivating technology-driven small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and by developing solutions to contemporary economic, technological and social problems.

By increasing the use of public sector research in the private sector, policy makers address key weaknesses in the Slovene economy. In particular the policy aims to increase the connection among universities, public research organizations and industry within specific technological areas increases the application of new knowledge toward the nation’s economic objectives. Three measures are of particular interest to increased cooperation and knowledge transfer among universities, public research organizations and industry:

1. the Centers of Excellence program;

2. the Competence Centers program; and

3. the Development Centers program.

As one of the shared primary objectives of the programs is the encouragement of linkages between key innovation actors, the authors of the paper employ social network analysis to explore the extent to which the programmes have achieved this and other short-term objectives. The authors’ analysis provides an excellent insight into the strengths and weaknesses of these programs. It reveals that although the policies are stimulating collaborations, there are different degrees of success; that linkages in practice differ from those anticipated in program development; and interestingly that the national innovation network is evolving into an international network within and across scientific areas. In providing this analysis, this paper demonstrates that social network analysis can provide important lessons to inform future policy development in Slovenia that are equally applicable elsewhere to shape evidence-based innovation policy development.

In the next paper, the views of senior academics with a policy role is explored under the title “University-industry knowledge exchange: an exploratory study of open innovation in UK universities,” by Ludmila Striukova and Thierry Reyna. The paper considers the changing nature of knowledge exchange between universities and businesses. While such knowledge exchange has been present for many years, the advent of the Open Innovation model has led to a renewed interest in university knowledge exchange practices. Although the idea behind Open Innovation is not, in itself, actually new, it was only after the term had been popularised by Chesbrough that the concept was applied in a strategic manner. Ten years later, thousands of companies, multinationals and SMEs alike, have integrated Open Innovation into the core of their business practices. This paper seeks to understand if similar changes have occurred in UK universities. It explores the efficient management of Open Innovation activities that must be adapted to the specific constraints, both local and global, that universities face. The aim of the study was to explore the particular environments in which universities engage in Open Innovation and to investigate the specific responses that universities develop to meet their intrinsic environmental constraints, using an exploratory study based on semi-structured interviews with Pro-Vice-Chancellors (or structural equivalent) of a variety of British universities.

Interview analysis reveals that many universities are now going beyond their traditional approaches and have been actively developing open innovation strategies. One of the main reasons for this is that both the role, and often funding, of universities has changed. Indeed, in many countries, universities are now considered by governments as center points within innovation networks made up of firms, individuals (students, then workers) and public institutions. Hence, universities, besides their traditional role of production and diffusion of knowledge, have started to transform into hubs, supporting complex Open Innovation relationships and a key finding is the identification of the “new” role of universities in positioning themselves as central actors within the Open Innovation ecosystem. Indeed, universities now act as intermediaries to bring together multiple parties to enable them to collaborate in a hosted and trusted environment.

This paper leads into “Openness in mediated university-industry collaboration: probing managerial perceptions” by Heikki Esa Oskari Moilanen et al. This paper sets out to find how the managers of intermediary organizations in the context of university-industry collaboration perceive the concept of openness. The importance of openness of the relationships among participants in university-industry collaboration is recognized. However, thus far, there is little integrating research indicating how managers and other key personnel in mediated university-industry collaboration perceive the concept of openness. To rectify this situation managers from 20 intermediary organizations were interviewed. In the interviews the managers were asked key questions such as: what does your organization do? What, in your opinion, are the key factors of success for this kind of knowledge exchange collaboration? And what are the possible key factors of failure for this kind of knowledge exchange collaboration?

An analysis of the interviews provides a framework for managers’ perception of openness in the context of mediated university-industry collaboration. The framework implies that managers perceive openness as driven by managing the relationship and driven by bringing people together. The framework also implies that managers perceive openness as a driver of co-creation and as a driver of beneficial results. These findings can be used to better understand the decision making of the managers of intermediary organizations.

The final paper in the portfolio, by Paul Benneworth and Jorge Cuhna, is forward looking, and develops an improved process of engagement for innovation, under the title “Universities’ contributions to social innovation: reflections in theory & practice”. The paper recognizes what has, and has not, worked for innovation in universities forming relationships with business, industry and the community in the past. It proposes the notion of a demand for a new kind of innovation which changes existing social systems and paradigms, thereby breaking the lock to the future and enabling new social networks and capabilities that evolve into new social structures and systems. The paper makes an important and original contribution by bridging theories of urban development and social innovation, universities, institutions and organizational dynamics. This is particular important against the background of the increased marketization of universities in recent years.

The paper uses an analogy with technological innovation processes and the specific mechanisms by which universities influence technological innovation. An important point Benneworth and Cunha make is that the “university is not necessarily the initiator or upstream source of innovation.” We believe the paper tackles new ground and makes recommendations for future research, development, policy and action for constructive change. It helps make clear to practitioners, within a university setting, the complexities and the tensions between the desire to increase activities in social innovation and the core activities of universities. While acknowledging that these tensions are not easily addressed, the paper also provides important and useful insights into the circumstances under which universities can value and benefit from participation in social innovation.

Taken together, we believe the papers provide an excellent contribution to vital innovation issues. Lessons are provided for national and regional policy makers; university academics at senior levels wishing to increase their entrepreneurial activity; and businesses seeking to maintain their competitive advantage in ever changing times. Further, gaps in the existing knowledge base are also filled and directions for future research activities are highlighted. We would like to thank all the authors for their excellent contributions and hope that the readers of the journal enjoy and are inspired by the papers presented within.

Dr Carl Abbott - School of the Built Environment, University of Salford, Salford, UK, and

Professor James A. Powell - UK Ambassador for Social Enterprise in Higher Education, Academic Director of the PASCAL International Programme on Universities for a Modern Renaissance, Honorary Professor in Education at Glasgow University, Emeritus Professor Academic Enterprise, Salford University Director of Smart City Futures and UPBEAT, Ambassador for the Leonardo European Corporate Learning Awards, Member of the New Club of Paris

References

Carayannis, E.G. and Campbell, D.F. (2009), “‘Mode 3’ and ‘quadruple helix’: toward a 21st century fractal innovation ecosystem”, International Journal of Technology Management, Vol. 46 No. 3, pp. 201-234

Chesbrough, H.W. (2003), Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, Harvard Business Press, Boston, MA

Dearing, B. (2002), Speech presented at the 25th Anniversary of the Centre for Urban Studies, Newcastle, September 16

European Union (2013), “Regulation (EU) No. 1301/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 December 2013”, available at: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2013:347:0289:0302:EN:PDF (accessed August 11, 2014)

Etzkowitz, H. and Leydesdorff, L. (2000), “The dynamics of innovation: from national systems and ‘mode 2’ to a triple helix of university-industry-government relations”, Research Policy, Vol. 29 No. 2, pp. 109-123

Grinevich, V., Hughes, A., Kitson, M. and Ternouth, P. (2008), Universities, Business and Knowledge Exchange, Council for Industry and Higher Education, London

McGettigan, A. (2013), The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education, Pluto Press, Bristol.