HE-RO Higher Education Institutions – Region Collaboration
Abstract
Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have taken centre stage in political strategies that aim at establishing knowledge and innovation based regions (e.g. EU 2020 strategy), as well as in scientific surveys that focus on HEIs’ impacts on regional innovation performance. Among different forms of impacts, collaborations have been highlighted as being of outstanding value as they lead to direct knowledge exchanges, enhanced awareness for new research and technology opportunities, enhanced problem solving capacities as well as increased absorptive capacities for scientific knowledge. Although for a long time commercialization-based collaborations between HEIs and industry have attracted the majority of political and scientific attention, conceptual approaches like the ‘engaged university’, the ‘entrepreneurial university’ and the ‘third mission of universities’ emphasize the need for a broader perspective on HEI-region interactions. On the basis of a comprehensive literature review and established research gaps, the HE-RO research project focuses on how HEIs and regional actors learn to interact and collaborate effectively in non-commercial problem-based activities and how this learning takes place. In doing so, institutional theoretical and organisational learning approaches are applied to identify how HEI-region interaction has become legitimate and / or taken for granted over the last 30 years. Through the application of techniques such as archival analysis and historical inquiry, developments are traced back for thirty years and are combined with explorative interviews, in-depth interviews as well as focus groups to provide a sound data basis to answer the stated research question. The innovative approach of the present proposal allows for a) a focus on how HEIs become involved in regional governance and regional problem-solving which goes beyond knowledge commercialization, b) the employment of tools for institutional analysis to understand how and under what conditions HEIs effectively collaborate with other organizations in regional governance, and c) the consideration of such collaboration in a dynamic and comparative framework. The HE-RO project aims at shedding light on how institutional and organisational changes contribute to establishing non-commercial problem-solving HEI-region interaction as legitimate and / or taken-for-granted activities, and how the underlying learning processes take place. This research task will be investigated in three well selected European regions (Braunschweig [Germany] or Lund [Sweden], Linz [Austria] and Enschede [Netherlands]). Cross-country analyses will enable the generation of high quality and, to a certain extent, generalizable results that will constitute a valuable and novel contribution to a persistent research gap – the ‘black-box’ – of how HEIs become involved in regional governance and regional problem-solving.
keywords University - region collaboration institutional change organisational learning transdisciplinarity knowledge-based problem-solving
Publikationen
Project staff
Marianne Penker
Univ.Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.nat.techn. Marianne Penker
marianne.penker@boku.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 47654-73115
Project Leader
01.04.2017 - 04.05.2017
Verena Radinger-Peer
Ass.Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Verena Radinger-Peer
verena.radinger-peer@boku.ac.at
Tel: +43 1 47654-85314
Project Leader
05.05.2017 - 14.10.2021