Mita Marra
University of Naples and EES Board Member
Over the last two decades, universities have taken on a prominent role in spurring regional economic growth. They serve as crucial hubs for human capital development and play a central role in nurturing entrepreneurship through education and training. These activities hold immense promise for fostering knowledge spillovers that can amplify local development outcomes.
I embarked on a research endeavor to evaluate the impact of higher education institutions (HEIs) on this form of human capital development. In my 2022 book, I explored the connections between non-traditional students, entrepreneurs, and researchers at the technology hub of the University of Naples Federico II in Italy. Subsequently, I joined a team conducting a Quality Assurance study of the European University Aurora, of which the University of Naples is an active member alongside 13 other European HEIs. Here, I could compare the challenges of connecting teaching quality assurance to the societal impact perspective that European University Alliance aims for. And it was the last year’s seminar on Quality Assurance that I organized to engage other European Alliances, national evaluation agencies (i.e., ACPUA, ANVUR, ARACIS), and international organizations, such as the OECD and the European Commission, that led me to curate a special issue for Evaluation and Program Planning on the theme of “Assessing University’s Societal Impact.” This special issue seeks to broaden the evaluation scope beyond traditional bibliometrics, quality assurance preoccupations, and the economic impact of technology transfer. It encompasses contributions that explore HEIs’ interactions with entrepreneurial ecosystems, the pursuit of sustainability and inclusivity in universities, and the principles of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI).
Furthermore, with the generous support of the US Mission to Italy, I have launched a new round of workshops aimed to engage diverse stakeholders in building university-industry collaborations to amplify entrepreneurship and bridge regional skills gaps. The inaugural workshop, held last July at the Italian Academic Center of New York in partnership with Cornell Tech and the OECD-EECOLE (the platform for entrepreneurship education), brought together 35 international experts and professionals. The overarching goal of the event was to create a vast network of universities and businesses capable of establishing and sustaining territorial ecosystems where research and innovation catalyze socially and environmentally sustainable technology transitions. The workshop unfolded along three sessions exploring the development of advanced skills required for production in deep tech sectors, the evaluation of the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of technology transformations and the critical role of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in regional development . Fernando Baquero-Gomez from Cornell Tech, Veronica Olabazal from BHP, Raffaele Trapasso from OECD, Maria Puch from the UN, Cliff Paredes from SBDC US, Charles Wessner from the Georgetown University and I contributed to several rounds of discussion.
A recurring theme emerged: universities serve as catalysts for human capital development and entrepreneurship, and assessing their impact requires navigating the intricate complexities of the higher education landscape and the broader socio-economic context at regional, national, and international levels. Examining the connections with multiple stakeholders and addressing critical issues related to technology development and social equity and sustainability are pivotal for assuring university-led innovation for regional development.
Evaluation becomes then paramount in identifying the causal mechanisms that underlie SMEs and startups support, skill enhancement, and production alignment with Industry 5.0 and green transition standards. Here, I propose a few considerations that could help design future evaluation endeavors:
Variability in the University System: The higher education landscape exhibits substantial diversity, both among different universities and within institutions. Universities often work as large bureaucratic entities, potentially hindering their effectiveness in promoting entrepreneurship and local development. The tradition of program evaluation can help understand how universities function, including staff productivity and mobility, faculty practices, and operational methods. Reconstructing the theories of change that underpin specific pathways to regional transformation can strengthen an evaluation strategy to assess the societal impact of research and education at different scales and across technical, human, and social science domains. The very notion of intrapreneurship becomes valuable for evaluation to consider the varying capacities of university faculty and researchers to drive innovation within their “productive interactions” not only through technology transfer and enterprise creation but more broadly by engaging with local communities. And exploring formal and informal exchanges with multiple stakeholders warrant an in-depth exploration through ethnographic studies besides statistical input-output analyses.
Knowledge Exploration vs. Commercialization: While most studies on university’s impact draw examples and cases from the United States, where the Bayh-Dole Act has governed and regulated economic activities promoted by HEIs over the past three decades, many gray areas persist. Multiple opportunities emanate from research and teaching, but they often fall outside the purview of existing taxonomies and evaluation metrics. For instance, the attraction and retention of researchers and recent graduates can yield significant economic and social impacts, fostering innovation and knowledge dissemination, even if they do not lead to new business creation, spin-offs, patents, or licensing. The evaluation of research has used bibliometrics within the science system, focusing on academic influence of publications. However, evaluating the economic and societal contributions of universities requires a broader range of methods, encompassing statistical measurements, content analyses, case studies, and expert judgment. This departure from a solely quantitative perspective addresses the limitations of an over-reliance on bibliometrics and narrow economic indicators.
Complexity of Job and Venture Creation: The university’s dual role in promoting skilled employment while fostering venture creation relies heavily on the capacity of local entrepreneurial ecosystems to attract and retain educated professionals, facilitating investments in venture capital and business support. Firm innovative capabilities hinge on the mobility of high-tech workers who bring fresh knowledge and catalyze novel ideas by transitioning between companies. However, in regions with lower Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) capacity to absorb human capital, digital transformation may exacerbate the emigration of skilled workers, amplifying inequalities within the labor market, particularly in less innovative areas. While attracting new businesses to a region can incentivize companies to seek out highly qualified knowledge workers, promoting learning by hiring requires a regional labor market flexible enough to ensure both the recruitment and replacement of qualified personnel. Universities exert an indirect influence on the local labor market and evaluation can help focus on logic of job placement strategies and practices.
On the business development front, the journey from startup inception to economic viability varies significantly by sector and territory. For instance, digital service startups typically require a minimum of three years to establish themselves, while nano or bio-technological ventures may necessitate up to seven years or longer. Beyond technical proficiency, the success of business development hinges on the ability to navigate the marketplace, discern consumer demand, establish a robust value chain — that is, factors linked to an entrepreneurial culture, which, in turn, hinges on the level of informal interaction within clusters of entrepreneurs and technological and science agents. Within these clusters, much of the critical knowledge tends to be highly technical or deeply tacit, making it challenging to disseminate beyond the confines of these close-knit circles. And yet, in the global market, international industry players can exert a substantial influence on innovation, labor mobility, and the growth trajectory of startups, thereby contributing to the diffusion of knowledge within both local and global supply chains and value networks. In such a g-local context, partnerships among universities, regional firms and multinationals can serve as conduits for merging international knowledge standards with localized learning experiences. The implication for evaluation is the need to reconstruct the multilayered networks populated by highly heterogeneous actors. The latter may develop dense complementarities or prioritize short-term gains of collaborations over the long-term sustainability of the value generated through scientific cooperation.
Challenges in the Broader Context: The socio-economic context presents multifaceted challenges that often lack straightforward solutions. As noted above, these challenges may encompass development obstacles, labor mobility complexities, and variable absorptive capacities among firms and local systems within unpredictable market dynamics. Establishing a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem is not solely a result of substantial public or private funding. An ecosystem is nurtured through collaborative efforts to create knowledge-based value, even if it is not immediately exploitable in the market. Co-innovation involves both short-term troubleshooting and long-term policy formation, defining roles, expectations, and risks in collaborative initiatives. A knowledge-based value creation strategy needs to overcome the fragmentation of local production systems, weaving inclusive networks that facilitate multidisciplinary coordination and cooperation. Effective solutions entail strengthening both upstream and downstream connections enhancing linkages between research and practical applications and fostering collaboration among academia, industry stakeholders, and the broader community in the global environment.
In this context, evaluation should differentiate between low- and high-performance businesses, small and medium-sized businesses, and large industrial and technological groups as well as between businesses and regions that receive financial support through innovation or welfare policies. As a close relationship exists between the absorption capacity of businesses and the entrepreneurial potential at a regional level, evaluation should observe how techno-scientific knowledge and tacit know-hows get integrated within traditional and emerging sectors through cross-sectional analyses.
Evaluation should delve into incentives, costs, risks, and constraints inherent in collaborations between businesses and universities. The pathways and contexts of local job placements for learners, dynamics within the regional labor market, and the coordination of economic and techno-scientific agents through trade associations and regional government agencies are also crucial issues to explore through complexity-sensitive designs. This requires the reconstruction of knowledge-based interactions to investigate embedded, adaptive, and emergent relationships at different scales, from student-mentor interaction to the collaboration between individual researchers and business partner organizations, and between the university and the regional and global players involved in innovation ecosystems.
Extending the boundaries of innovation processes beyond the absorption capacity of individual companies, but also and beyond a vision based on resources could help overcome the separation between micro-level assessments of technology transfer — typically based on the number of patents, spin-offs, and licenses — and macro-level evaluation of research policy — typically based on R&D public spending and private investments.
Beyond these considerations, ethics play a pivotal role. Responsible research and innovation demand the active engagement of multiple stakeholders to facilitate equitable access to resources and data. HEIs’ mission aims not only to strengthen and diffuse viable technology but first and foremost to enable underprivileged individuals to become successful entrepreneurs and qualified professionals. A critical reflection on sustainability indicators to avoid performance assessment perverse incentives and greenwashing requires then a shift from a metric-focused approach to a theory of change with a longer-term perspective, involving multiple stakeholders in sustainable transitions and socially transformative practices.
Next steps in the agenda are the professional development workshop on sustainability assessment and the session on SMEs and startups support programs in the online event organized by EES next November – I sincerely hope you will join me there!
References
Audretsch, D.B., From the Entrepreneurial University to the University for the Entrepreneurial Society, in «The Journal of Technology Transfer», 39, 3, 2014, pp. 313–321.
Audretsch, D.B., Lehmann, E.E., Menter, M. e Wirsching, K., Intrapreneurship and Absorptive Capacities: The Dynamic Effect of Labor Mobility, in «Technovation», 99, 102129, 2021.
Marra, M. (2022) Productive interactions in digital training partnerships: Lessons learned for regional development and university societal impact assessment, Evaluation and Program Planning, 95, 102173, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evalprogplan.2022.102173