The regional problem in the United Kingdom appears to be one of the most persistent in the whole of the European Community. Within the UK, and elsewhere in Europe, there has been a growing recognition that the level of research and technological innovation in a local area or region is a major long-term influence on its economic growth and development. This chapter investigates the association between research and technological development (RTD) and economic growth at the local and regional level, specifically looking at the UK situation. It outlines the national and European context for RTD, reviewes particular policy shifts and constraints, and concludes with some major issues that need to be addressed when developing RTD initiatives at a local or regional level. Developments in process or capital technology do not have such long-term significance in terms of output and employment as advances in product innovation and sophistication.

AbstractThe arrival of a global pandemic would seem to demand a wide-ranging response from universities committed to contributing to society and to their local areas. The nature of COVID-19 impacted all the domains in which universities take an active part in civic society. In the UK the pandemic arrived at a time when universities were developing civic engagement agreements with their host cities. These new civic partnerships, in some cases involving more than one university in a city, had a remit encompassing health as well as economic and social development. These plans were swiftly repositioned to deal with COVID-19 as part of city-wide emergency plans to manage the immediate effects of the pandemic and the economic shutdown. This chapter explores the responses made by the two universities in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, working with local partners. It examines the nature of the relationships developed and the steps taken. In both universities there were a variety of local responses addressing both the immediate health needs and the long-term economic revival of the city. Working together the universities developed a city-wide partnership to support ongoing engagement within the framework of a civic university agreement.

The authors have added to the growing collection of books about universities and regions. Certainly, it is a subject that remains highly topical with current policy developments in many European countries and growing interest in developing countries. In this case the focus is on regional innovation, and the book keeps a central focus on this rather than some of the wider regional impacts of universities such as on culture, heath, governance and social development. It is quite a short book, just 125 pages for the main text, but with five substantial appendices of university case studies. The authors seek to develop a framework to assess the regional innovation impact (RII) potential and performance of universities. Part I develops this RII framework as an analytical model and as an approach. Part II then draws on a rich body of new case studies, only some of which are in the appendices, to explore the components of the model. Part III then looks at issues of implementation, before the final section with the case study appendices. The book starts with a statement that universities make a significant impact to their home towns or cities, but then asks a series of questions about how important, whether they work with local businesses and if they can be incentivized to do more. The authors argue that we lack evidence for these issues, and there is therefore the need to shine a light into the black box. This book, I would argue, only partly addresses these questions. It has a particular focus on regional innovation, which is only a part of a university’s regional mission. It surveys a set of research-intensive universities, and by so doing neglects a majority of institutions. It also focuses heavily on university leadership and policymaker concerns, which I would argue gives an official story of university regional engagement, with inevitable limitations. These restrictions are fair enough, as the topic is huge, and despite the claims is also well studied. The challenge for the authors is to make a significant addition to that literature, or to add a perspective that is genuinely useful to policy development. The central focus is on the concept of RII, developed by the authors in recent years within a European Union (EU) policy study. RII is defined here as:

There has been demand in many countries for the establishment of small campuses in more rural locations to spread the benefits of higher education both through the provision of university courses and through the positive economic spill-overs for these communities. Evaluations of the impacts of these universities according to current models show limited effects due to their small scale and specialization. Yet whilst there are clearly spill-over benefits from rural campuses into local communities, these are not only of the traditional (knowledge and economic) variety. Rather, regional campuses create social infrastructure that supports these places' quality of life. This article seeks to develop a proposal for how such social impacts of regional campuses could be evaluated by creating a conceptual framework that articulates how university-region learning communities contribute to socio-economic development trajectories of rural regions. Our overarching hypothesis is that social rural campuses are places where local learning communities work with globally sourced knowledge to make it useful and usable in particular local contexts. Over time, these activities form the basis of regular contact networks, and the benefits they bring become woven into the provision of place-specific welfare services. As a result, the university's contributions play a more structural role, and the students are involved in creating more lasting benefits by providing the interaction underpinning these structural collaborations. Our model is exemplified through an exploration of the context of the status of rural university campuses in Norway, and a case study of the Academy of Music, an outpost of the multi-campus University of Tromso (UiT The Arctic University of Norway).

Clusters can be seen as evolving on several different levels. This chapter seeks to integrate literatures from business history, strategy, economic geography and innovation studies to illustrate the evolution of the idea of the cluster and speculate on current developments and appropriate policy formulations. It examines the evolution of business clusters. In recent years the evolution of the cluster concept has seen changes in the ways in which knowledge flows – from simple face-to-face flows based on proximity and localized labour markets to facilitated cluster organizations and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Once the cluster is growing, the next stage is a period of sustained development usually described in terms of growth. Clusters often have their own governance structures and leadership – sometimes emergent leadership from within the business community, sometimes a form of imposed leadership from within the regional policy community in the form of a specialized cluster agency.

Over the past years, the role of universities has been faced with important changes that led to substantial attention from both researchers and policy-makers to their third mission, labelled 'a contribution to society', besides the teaching and research missions. University spin-offs (USOs or ASOs, for Academic spin-offs), emerged among the potential means for universities to pursue the third mission. Research on the creation, emergence, development and scaling up of USOs has grown significantly with contributions from multiple subject areas. This special issue contributes to the research debate by presenting novel insights that deepen and enhance our understanding of the dynamics surrounding the entrepreneurial aspects of academic spin-offs, their growth and their mutual relationship with regional development. The special issue provides rigorous qualitative, quantitative and theoretical investigations to form a research agenda which will help guide future research efforts.

There is limited experience with innovation policies in rural areas, often based on a one-size-fits-all approach. However, rural businesses have diverse needs and there is difficulty in applying smart specialisation approaches for the use of European Union Cohesion funding in rural areas. A key resource in rural areas is the local university, and universities face increased demands to support local firms. This paper examines one particular case of a university in a rural region and its use of the European Regional Development Fund to support innovation activities. The challenges of working with rural businesses are explored, as is the focus on one-to-one support rather than the more collective smart specialisation approach. Universities need to take a pragmatic approach to ensure that the needs of firms can be balanced with the capacities of rural universities which are often smaller and more specialised than urban universities.

Current EU policies aim to support regional research, development, and innovation activities. The Cohesion Policy, implemented through Structural Funds (SFs) Operational Programmes, seeks to foster local level innovation. In parallel, universities have become important drivers of regional development through their ‘third mission’ driven by the different policy levels. This article investigates the tensions between the primary institutional logics of the university and the institutional logic of the SF programmes in peripheral regions as experienced by a multi-disciplinary university network from Finland. The findings from the case study reveal competing and co-evolving institutional logics of the two frameworks; university-led SF activities increase collaboration with local stakeholders, but the implementation of SF projects remains challenging (e.g. strict guidelines, higher education (HE) policies driving research excellence). Further investigation of these results in different regional contexts could provide new tools for managing the university third mission more efficiently, through SF programmes and beyond.

Objective The Role of Universities in Innovation and Regional Development (RUNIN) is a European Training Network for Early-Stage Researchers (ESRs) in the field of science and innovation studies. The aim of the network is to train researchers on how universities contribute to innovation and economic growth in their regions through research seeking to examine how universities fulfill their third mission in relation to regional industry and explore the range of university engagement with regional firms and institutions. The project operationalises the main research question of how universities can contribute to innovation and regional development through four main themes: People and Networks, Policies and Interventions, Places and Territories, and Practices and Governance. The aim of the training programme is to equip the next generation of researchers with the skills required to work across employment

At a regional level this is not so new, since the North East has had a variety of regional development strategies and innovation strategies dating back to the 1990s, associated with the implementation of the EU Structural Funds, with the former Regional Development Agency and now with the North East Local Enterprise Partnerships. These typically involved many aspects of the new local Industrial Strategies, so what’s new and what should the region be doing?