Abstract
Recent work on Region Innovation Systems (RIS) has emphasised the importance of universities. Until recently, however, related insights into the dynamics of this relationship in respect of the specific role of the science park have been limited. This paper presents a systematic review identifying the key roles of each actor in relation to innovation. We link the dynamic roles performed by the university between science parks and the RIS. Our results enable us to identify how the key activities performed by the university change during its interrelations within the RIS and with the science park. Our analysis of the literature distinguishes between three sets of relationships through which the university plays differing roles: RIS-university, RIS-university-science park, and university-science park. Respectively, the University’s relationships between these different RIS actors focuses on: resource sharing, brokerage, and commercialisation-exploitation. Secondly, we find that within each of these relationship types the university can perform three types of roles: on knowledge co-creation, acting as conduit, and inter-organisational relationship building. Distinguishing between these differing relationships and roles enables us to identify a total of nine dynamic roles performed by the University, which include: provision of information, channels of communication, infrastructure, regional networking, building research collaboration, acting as knowledge intermediaries, economic development, technological change and commercialisation processes, and start up creation and commercialisation. The review identifies several gaps in the literature in need of further research, and suggests that university relationships with RIS, interlinked with those between the university and science park itself, are important factors affecting science park innovation performance.
Highlights
Universities’ traditional roles, of teaching and research, are increasingly being supplemented by government policies aimed at increasing the “entrepreneurial” activities as a way to help develop the economy, for example through student start-ups (Wright et al 2017)
We define the review protocols and map the literature by: (1) accessing, (2) retrieving and (3) judging the quality and relevance of the literature in relation to the research topic, according to explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria. As part of this we classify the quality of papers, following Turner et al (2013) approach of selecting papers categorised by journal rating (based on the Chartered Association of Business School’s (CABS) Academic Journal Guide 2018)
(2) Articles had to be published after 1990. This time period is selected due to the concept of regional innovation system (RIS) most consistently appearing and being developed during the 1990s, the literature on science parks most strongly observed during this period, and the need to focus on policy developments in the context of these more recent developments
Summary
Universities’ traditional roles, of teaching and research, are increasingly being supplemented by government policies aimed at increasing the “entrepreneurial” activities as a way to help develop the economy, for example through student start-ups (Wright et al 2017). Policy makers and governments are increasingly looking to Universities to contribute to the regional innovation system (RIS) and/or entrepreneurial ecosystem (Feldman et al 2019), as part of building the knowledge based economy and fostering regional competitiveness This role of the university in regional economic and social development has heavily influenced policy over the past 20 years (Acs et al 2009; Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 1996, 1999), further altering the role of universities. Only a limited number of studies focused on science parks incorporate the RIS, with even fewer focused on the university as a key stakeholder within this This gap requires us first to integrate findings from these two literatures and identify what they have found and focused on far.
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