I’ve written a few times about the importance of universities to the innovation ecosystem. For instance, the University of Michigan’s Jason Owen Smith argues in his latest book Research Universities and the Public Good, high quality universities offer three unique components to a community:
- They are sources of knowledge and talent who converge in great diversity and scale on every university campus.
- They are community anchors who act as contributing institutional citizens for a region, with the longevity and stability of universities highly valuable.
- They are connecting hubs who funnel people and ideas from the local community and then back out into the wider world in a similar way to hub airports do.
Of course, the very nature of innovation today is largely international, so do universities play as big a role in regional innovation as they do in local innovation? That was the question posed by the European Universities Association in a recently published report.
“This report provides part of the answer by looking at how universities work in their regional environment, based on an impressive number of interviews done in nine different regions,” the authors say. “By going deep into a small number of regional innovation ecosystems, it reveals the mechanisms that universities and their partners use to promote innovation.”
Co-creation
The paper provides a qualitative analysis of how universities are engaging with the wider innovation ecosystem. The study examines nine different regions around Europe, and just as Jason Owen Smith illustrates, they reveal the pivotal role universities play in all nine innovation ecosystems.
They reveal that both businesses and governments see universities as playing a crucial role in being able to connect the dots. They bring the benefits of impartiality, curiosity and a long-term perspective that are often crucial for innovation to thrive.
“To connect the dots effectively, the university has to be highly responsive, adaptable, strategically directed, autonomously governed, and densely interlinked with its regional partners as well as an international network,” the authors say.
Central to this role is the ability not only to conduct research and educate future professionals and academics, but to bring together diverse perspectives and disciplines into a melting pot that is ideal for recombinative innovation to thrive.
The paper highlights seven clear shifts in how innovation is organized:
- Linear to reiterative innovation – with a break from the linear progression from basic research to commercialisation and a move towards a process whereby basic and applied research work alongside prototype development.
- Closed to open innovation – with open innovation placing a renewed emphasis on the vital role universities play in connecting up disparate parts of the ecosystem.
- From technological to systemic innovation – as the World Economic Forum highlighted earlier this year, many of the challenges facing society are complex and systemic, and therefore require a multitude of stakeholders working together. The days of a silver bullet technology solving challenges is over.
- From individual to collaborative innovation – this then feeds into the nature of innovation itself, with the ‘lone scientist’ myth of old firmly consigned to the dustbin and collaborative, interdisciplinary teams the future of innovation.
- From spontaneous to systematic innovation – serendipity has always played a big part in the innovation myth, but with innovation increasingly requiring complex and systemic change, the authors believe this no longer applies (if it ever did).
- From exchange-based innovation to co-creation – which again taps into the increasingly systemic nature of innovation, with a shift away from bilateral, transactional innovation towards a more multi-lateral environment where multiple stakeholders co-create innovations together.
- From innovation projects to common innovation cultures – with innovation spaces acting as hubs to pull the right stakeholders together so that they can co-create the future.
“The study shows how the paradigm shifts in innovation reflect a common quest of the triple helix partners for new forms and practices of connectivity,” the authors conclude. “Innovation potential is mobilised through the diversity of perspectives and competences of the different partners.”
