Science and Technology Parks (STPs) have become key organizational arrangements for strengthening university–industry collaboration within contemporary innovation systems. This study presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of research published between 2016 and 2025 to examine how STPs operate as intermediary structures and how their roles have evolved over time. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, peer-reviewed articles indexed in Web of Science and Scopus were analyzed using a descriptive mapping and thematic approach. The findings reveal a shift from a primary focus on technology transfer toward more complex ecosystem-oriented functions, with universities increasingly acting as entrepreneurial and coordinating actors. The review also identifies persistent challenges, including institutional misalignment, fragmented governance, and capacity constraints affecting collaboration outcomes. By providing a structured comparison of changes in Triple Helix roles and interaction logics, this study contributes to a more integrated understanding of STPs as evolving innovation intermediaries. The results offer practical implications for higher education institutions and policymakers seeking to enhance university–industry collaboration and innovation ecosystem development.
Industries 4.0 and 5.0 call for engineers who are technically deep, digitally fluent, and entrepreneurially capable, yet engineering education still treats entrepreneurship as elective content reaching only a motivated minority, with accreditation frameworks omitting it as a required graduate attribute. This paper proposes Entrepreneurship as a Service (EaaS), a pedagogical model grounded in service-dominant logic that reframes entrepreneurial development as a continuous institutional service co-created with industry, rather than a course to be delivered. A survey of engineering faculty across 19 countries grounds the model empirically: faculty already teach entrepreneurially and broadly support institution-wide reform, but rate institutional support as their weakest resource, a shortfall most pronounced in the Middle East and North Africa. EaaS responds through five pedagogical layers and a governance layer that moves industry from advisory boards to operational co-design of projects and assessments, offering universities a route from policy ambition to curriculum practice.
This study examines the effects of horizontal education-job mismatch on employees’ work attitudes and career visions in a medium-sized Japanese company, using newly available longitudinal personnel data and employee satisfaction survey data. The empirical results revealed that horizontal education-job mismatch is a high-frequency time-varying phenomenon within organizations. Additionally, the study showed that horizontal education-job mismatch has a negative impact on employees’ work attitudes and career visions, even after controlling for individual-specific effects. Although these findings are consistent with previous studies regarding the existence of and negative effects of education-job mismatch in the labor market, given the heterogeneity of institutional frameworks across countries, the results of this study must be linked to the pertinent institutional contexts of the Japanese labor market with its distinctive structures. When considering improvement of horizontal education-job mismatch, previous research suggests that higher education institutions need to provide education more consistent with the skill demands in the labor market. However, because human resource management in an organization has a significant influence on incidences of horizontal education-job mismatch in Japan, matching labor demand (task) to labor supply (skill) may be more important than matching labor supply to labor demand in order to improve horizontal education-job mismatch.
Design thinking is increasingly used in entrepreneurship education as a human-centred, experiment-driven pedagogy for navigating uncertainty and innovation. However, evidence remains fragmented across contexts, outcomes, and pedagogical implementations. Guided by PRISMA 2020, this systematic review synthesises post-2020 empirical and conceptual studies indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. Following inclusion, exclusion, and quality appraisal, 18 peer-reviewed journal articles were retained for integrative thematic synthesis. Four themes emerged: sustainability and social-impact entrepreneurship learning; measured learning and psychological outcomes; digital, gamified, and platform-mediated learning; and programme and ecosystem design linking universities, communities, and industry. Across themes, design thinking was associated with opportunity recognition, creativity, experiential engagement, and competency development, while evidence concerning self-efficacy and longer-term entrepreneurial behaviour was heterogeneous. Overall, the evidence suggests that design thinking may offer greater educational value when integrating authentic problem discovery, iterative experimentation, reflective feedback, mentoring, and institutional support.
The significance of mentoring for graduate employability is well established; however, the current literature assumes the process of mentoring to be a stable training tool without elaborating on mechanisms of change. Using the framework of Critical Realism, this study explores mentoring as a generative mechanism that influences employability of female MBA students in India. Applying the method of narrative analysis to 325 student on their mentoring experiences, we obtain 4212 coded segments falling under three related pathways: Corporate Fitness (career-related skills), Crisis of Confidence (self-belief), and Communication as Bridge (mechanism of change). Our findings indicate that mentoring triggers a latent potential of psychosocial agency (Real layer) through mentor-mentee relationship (Actual layer) which results in observable placement readiness (Empirical layer). While in the current body of literature skill development and belief restoration are seen as independent processes, mentoring is a causal system where communication competency helps convert self-efficacy into career competence.
