Abstract
"The society based on knowledge and innovation brings to the fore the role of universities as research and learning spaces, with the purpose for sustainable development, at local, regional, national and global levels. Following this approach, we explore the capacity of spreading the knowledge and innovation capital in the North-West region of Romania between universities, the private sector and the public sector. Also, the study explores the role taken by the university system in Romania, locally and regionally, emphasizing what type of relationship defines the exchange of outputs and what are the most useful know-how transfer mechanisms from universities to the private and public sectors. The empirical research in this paper has shown that there is a growing relationship between universities – private sector – public sector, which is characterized as ‘in an incipient phase’, ‘based on urgent needs of the parties’. All of the actors involved in this triad want to develop the links between universities – private sector – public sector in communication, research, innovation and technology, and they suggest standardization and regulation of this interaction and developing a legal framework to correspond to the actual needs at local and regional levels."
Highlights
We explore the capacity of spreading the knowledge and innovation capital in the North-West region of Romania between universities, the private sector and the public sector
All of the actors involved in this triad want to develop the links between universities – private sector – public sector in communication, research, innovation and technology, and they suggest standardization and regulation of this interaction and developing a legal framework to correspond to the actual needs at local and regional levels
We aim to underline the role taken by the university system locally and regionally in Romania, emphasizing what type of relationship defines the exchange of outputs and what are the most useful know-how transfer mechanisms from universities to private sector and public sector
Summary
The Knowledge Revolution redefines the development equation and places education, together with human and intellectual capital, and social and institutional capital, at the center of the development strategies (Gal, 2002).The different perspectives brought more meanings to the concept of education, as the functionalism of Durkheim (1925) and Parsons (1961), in which education was society’s transmitter for norms and values (apud Haralambos and Holborn, 2008), the modern and postmodern perspective, where the educational system is the transmitter in terms of economic growth (see Hassink, 2005; Goddard and Kempton, 2011), sustainability (see Stephens et al, 2008; Zilahy and Huisingh, 2009; Andrews, 2015), production and knowledge transfer (see Florinda, 1995; Cooke and Leydesdorff, 2006; Geuna and Muscio, 2009), innovation (see Youtie and Shapira, 2008; Runiewicz-Wardyn, 2013) and democracy (see Arbo and Benneworth, 2007; Mullin, Kotval and Cooper, 2012).The tendency to change the educational policy, the massification of the educational process, to offer access and to attract a more numerous public became one of the mechanisms through which society copes with the global changes at all levels (Geuna and Muscio, 2009; Haralambos and Holborn, 2008, Curaj et al, 2015). According to Lindberg (2007), the extended participation in higher education and continuous learning in developed and developing countries, in the last decades, determined a bigger interest for the decisional factors in the transition process, from the student to the employer, the so called ‘education to work’ phenomenon In this scenario, the universities became main governing characters, as Florida (1995) and Sternberg (2014) endorse, with the capacity to offer expertise and specific knowledge, know-how exchange (Sedlacek, 2013; Viitanen, Markkula and Soler, 2013), contributing to the durable regional development due to the partners’ network (local, national, international) and the civic society. The universities’ role to produce knowledge and expertise has a major role in the economic development based on knowledge and innovation, capital which in turn has become a spatial differentiator for sustainability and progress. Asheim and Coenen (2006) have shown the impact of the territorial factors on production growth and on the innovative capacity in a shared space
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