Along the Pathway of University Missions

Abstract

Over the last decades, the pressure on the university to facilitate direct application and exploitation of its knowledge and capabilities to contribute to social, cultural, and economic development has steadily increased. As a result, new missions have been recognized to universities, new theoretical frameworks have been developed, and new university models have been proposed, including the “entrepreneurial university”, the “civic university”, the “community-engaged university”, the “transformative university” or the “interconnected university”. Thus, a corresponding advancement of performance metrics and indicators used to assess the impact of university activities is required. Through a bibliometric and then a critical review of the extant literature, this study provides: i) an overall picture of the state-of-art of literature on universities' missions and roles in regional development; ii) a systematisation of the contributions on performance measures and indicators of universities' activities.