Strategic agency and institutional change: investigating the role of universities in regional innovation systems (RISs)

Figures & data

Table 1. Transformative leadership processes for innovation.

Regional innovation system (RIS) problems (after Rodríguez-Pose, 2013)	Institutional entrepreneurship intervention in RIS	University contributions	Private tensions (coalition partners)
A lack of collectively held new cultural–cognitive understandings of the role that regional actors can play in a globally oriented knowledge economy	Expanding regional partners’ needs, aspirations and capabilities for innovation (Gunasekara, 2006)	Creating courses for regional employers, undertaking regional research programmes, reorienting core university activities to support the region staff going out part-time or on sabbatical to work in regional activities (Arbo & Benneworth, 2007)	These courses are seen as being something done by peripheral staff rather than as a way of leveraging world-class research in the university, so become cost-driven rather than a genuine valorization activity (Pinheiro, 2012)
Missing structural elements in the RIS governance system allowing collective smart specialization/constructed regional advantage activities	Building a collective institutional structure to oversee progress (Cooke, 2011)	Universities participate in transversal innovation platforms direct/manage innovation activities which produce benefits (Lester & Sotorauta, 2007)	Academic collaboration is very time consuming, forcing researchers to prioritize other goals and making it in practice less important to engage: academic drift (Arbo & Eskelinen, 2003)
Lack of understanding of potential opportunities for better exploiting regional knowledge to drive innovation-based regional economic development	Developing a robust regional knowledge base to exploit new global–local opportunities (Asheim et al., 2011)	University works with regional firms in pre-competitive research projects/programmes in potential new combination areas creating novel knowledge pool (Isaksen & Karlsen, 2010)	University structures reward publication and research grant-winning activities rather than engagement, and so academics undertake less regional activity (Feldman & Desrochers, 2003)
A failure of local actors to collaborate collectively to position themselves in emerging high-technology niches with economic development potential	Identifying common goals for novel global–local combinations (McCann & Ortega-Argilés, 2013)	University provides a global context and new application areas for local clusters with high-value, place-specific knowledges (Cai & Liu, 2015)	Once the university has secured the strategy and associated investments it withdraws from the regional coalition to pursue world-class excellence goals, (Benneworth, 2012)
A failure to mobilize collective/share resources and co-investments to underpin innovation-based economic development	Mobilizing collective resources to deliver needs (Bergek et al., 2008). From bridging to co-generation of knowledge involves two types of institutional entrepreneurship (Karlsen, Larrea, Aranguren, & Wilson, 2012)	Universities fund shared pools, pump-priming persuades others (local/national/international) to contribute their own funds and invest in mixed public/private research programmes for collective benefit (Goddard & Vallance, 2013)	University spends a lot of effort launching pilot projects but these fail to acquire internal legitimacy within the university so they are not mainstreamed or extended (Cloete et al., 2011)

Table 2. Spaces for and resistance to university institutional entrepreneurs supporting RIS development.

	Potential regional innovation system (RIS) contribution	Role of institutional entrepreneurs	Potential resistance to institutional entrepreneurs
Leaders	Interacting with regional actors in regional engagement platform or collective activity offering university contributions to regional collective innovation assets	Advocating the idea of strategic regional engagement thereby legitimizing the process from an organizational perspective	Unwilling to allow the university to profile itself as a relevant/regional university rather than excellent/rigorous, world-class university
Support agents	Providing assets and infrastructure that facilitate new knowledge combinations and support new regional knowledge opportunities	Developing a university strategy, deepening and formalizing routings associated with regional engagement activities	Unwilling to allow the university or unit to bear the risk of uncertain activities to generate financial risk/loss or reputational damage
Knowledge agents	Active scanning of the regional environment by enthusiastic academics to create new opportunities (path creation/path switching)	Identification by individual academics or groups with the institutional regional engagement goals and hence being willing to engage and promote regional engagement ethos	Unwilling to legitimate and recognize engaged teaching or research behaviour as valid; unwilling to allow own knowledge to be used in regional engagement activities
Interaction assemblies	Formal mechanisms for bridging structures and activities across the academic core to the outside world (strategic regional partners and place-based initiatives)	Embedding particular practical examples of regional partners enriching core university activities into university’s working norms, practices and policies	Unwilling to equate and acknowledge engaged behaviour with other kinds of desirable activity, rejecting it becoming part of the mainstream

Table 3. Key tensions identified across cases.

Tension (institutional dimension)	Twente	Tromsø	Oulu
Between local relevance and global excellence	Limited scope to ‘bend’ core research activities to address regional needs (a case of regional support for core functions instead)	Engaged units – political scientists – failed to develop scientific excellence Limited local impact of centres of research excellence	Engaged units – engineers – failed to develop scientific excellence Scope of regional research stations (resource allocations)
Between strategic ambitions for the future and current engagement patterns	Emergence of two tiers of engagement activity, with the strategy focused on a very narrow version, overlooking most of the other kinds of engagement	Centralization of strategic decisions (heartland bypassed) but interpreted in ways that engagement was ‘nice to have’ rather than essential	Centralization of strategic decisions, including major structural changes (managerialism prevails over professionalism)
Between those that benefit and those that are penalized by regional engagement being legitimate	Pure engagement work heavily taxed to subsidized core research activities; real beneficiaries those doing pure research with strong applications	Some fields (natural sciences) caped external funding whereas others (humanities) struggle to find external sponsors	Strong fields like technology/medicine expected to cross-subsidized struggling fields like humanities Entrepreneurial ethos clashes with egalitarian traditions
Between engagement integrated in core tasks and engagement delegated to peripheries and projects	Technology transfer function dependent on the availability of subsidies (‘projectization’)	Leading academic actors set informal precedent that engagement should not be done at the expense of core (T + R) activities	Changes in curriculum structures aligned with industry needs had negative effects on graduate employability

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