HE-RO Higher Education Institutions - region collaboration

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.

The project HERO "HE-RO Higher education institutions - region collaboration" investigates how organisational internal as well institutional framework conditions influence HEI-region interaction. Thereby the focus is on non-commercial activities such as informal advice, consultancy, information gathering, join research, consortia, joint publications and interpretation roles. The core research interest is to investigate how universities develop their regional role and how regional engagement develops from being unfamiliar, to accepted, to taken-for-granted. The HE-RO project takes a dynamic perspective, which covers the last 20 years in three well-chosen case studies: Linz (Austria), Kaiserslautern (Germany), Twente (The Netherlands). The results reveal that universities' regional engagement is not a self-evident process. The place-specific nature of universities regional engagement is shaped by historically developed governance structures and already existing relationships between HEIs and their region. The amount and type of engagement activities is not only influenced by the university but strongly moderated by the willingness and capacity of respective regional stakeholders to interact and collaborate with the university. The dynamic long-term investigations revealed that normative and regulative changes in the national and international environment spurred institutional and organisational changes within the universities. Thereby the national state and its respective political strategies and funding programs play a decisive role for the initiation of regional engagement activities on the organisational level. Especially in the field of non-commercial activities, the international case studies confirm that the universities are often reactive instead of proactive agenda-setters (e.g. sustainable development). Due to the persistent lack of institutionalization of non-commercial HEI-region interactions, a lack of incentives, recognition and role models for researchers to engage in this type of activity as well as lack of intermediary organizations which organize, spur and facilitate this type of cooperation, the engagement of individual 'frontrunners' is key. The empirical results show that the bottom-up engagement of motivated individuals together with the top down support of the university management is essential to establish non-commercial HEI-region interactions as legitimate and taken-for-granted activities. Overall the in-depth investigations confirmed that non-commercial HEI-region interactions are multi-faceted in nature and not self-evident. They are influenced by individual level determinants (e.g. gender, academic age, experience), organizational level determinants (e.g. type and founding idea of the HEI, applied and basic research, incentives), regional level determinants (e.g. universities role within the region, regional networks, absorptive capacity, other HEIs), and system level determinants (e.g. national policies, funding programmes). The novel and innovative approach of the HE-RO project contributes to the theoretical and conceptual scientific discourse on how HEIs become involved in regional governance and problem-solving. Furthermore HE-RO provides cutting-edge insights into the factors that account for effective HEI-region collaboration and as such supports the design of appropriate organizational and institutional framework conditions.