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Bottom-level organizational changes within entrepreneurial and engaged models of university: insights from Italy

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Abstract

We analyze the way in which individual academics and research groups organize their third mission activities before and after the institutionalization of third mission strategies by the university governing body. Drawing on the literature, we put forward an interpretative framework that links central entrepreneurial or engaged strategies with the way academics organize their third mission activities. Then, we propose an application of this frame to the case of the University of Florence (Italy), before and after its transition to more structured entrepreneurial and engaged models. We use a mix of quantitative and qualitative analysis. A cluster analysis allows identifying different types of academics involved in the third mission based on the way they organize their activities. Furthermore, a set of interviews to academics complements the comparison and the interpretation of the clusters obtained. The following paths of change emerge: (1) increased proportion of academics involved in third mission activities; (2) bottom-level initiatives that are aligned with central strategies; and (3) increased heterogeneity of bottom-level organization forms, with a relative loss of importance of the group dimension with respect to the individual academics and an increased specialization of research groups.

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Notes

  1. Often, but not in any case. For example, a regulation that assigns to universities the right to patent the artifacts invented by academics disincentives the latter to make disclosure of their invention at their universities (Thursby and Thursby 2002).

  2. The decentralized models suggested by Debackere and Veugelers (2005) correspond to a combination of matrix forms of TTO (Bercovitz et al. 2001) with networked forms of partnership (Bednar and Godkin 2009) between the TTO, academics operating transfer activities, and stakeholders. Organizational solutions extend to networks with external structures of technological transfer in partnership with the internal ones (Brescia et al. 2016).

  3. See Legislative Decrees n. 297 of 1999 and n. 179 of 2012, and Ministerial Decree n. 168 of 2011.

  4. One of the authors of this paper, Marco Bellandi, has had academic responsibilities regarding the third mission of the University of Florence. The account of facts reported in this Section is partially based on this experience, but they have also the support of documents (in Italian) that are available upon request to the authors.

  5. The regional innovation poles (and technological districts), funded by the Tuscany Region in 2011–2014, as consortia between universities, technology transfer centers, firms and other organizations located in Tuscany, should provide a range of knowledge-intensive services to local firms (Russo et al. 2018). CsaVRI and FRI have also participated in national and EU funded projects.

  6. See http://www.sviluppo.toscana.it/maplab, last acceded on 29th November 2019.

  7. See “Tematiche per un possibile piano strategico: la riflessione dell’Università di Firenze”, speech given by M. Bellandi at the Conference: Come si governa l’area metropolitana. Politiche, strumenti, attori, Urban.it & University of Florence, Firenze 7th–8th May 2015. The strategic plan, elaborated in 2016 with the help of academics leading some of the UNIFI research groups, identified the following themes: technology development and quality of life, technology development and systems of firms, territorial economic attractiveness, urban and territorial planning, mobility, energy, local welfare.

    See also http://pianostrategico.cittametropolitana.fi.it/, last accessed on 29th November 2019.

  8. Some of these databases have been created during the development of the project “Strategie competitive ed azioni di marketing per i centri di ricerca, gli spin-off ed i servizi all’innovazione dell’ateneo fiorentino”, funded by the Fondazione Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze (see Acknowledgements). Guidelines and some data on third mission activities are now available at: https://www.unifi.it under the drop-down menu “third mission” (last access 29th November 2019). Data on contract research cannot be publicly disclosed due to privacy issues.

  9. After 2013, the modality of registration of the activities related to the third mission changes, and its results are not fully comparable with the previous model. Therefore, we decided to stop our analysis in this year. We report the results of the cluster analysis for the previous 3 years (2007–2009). However, as the first year in which the University started to keep track of the activities of the third mission is 2004, we have also analyzed the period 2004–2006. Results of such analysis are mentioned in Sect. 5, and are available upon request to the authors.

  10. The survey launched in 2014 was related to the whole population of academics at UNIFI, and was implemented under the project funded by Fondazione Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze (see footnote 8). In May–June 2018 and January–February 2019, we interviewed 4 research groups.

  11. The hierarchical agglomerative linkage method we used is a centroid linkage, which works well in presence of outliers (outperforming entrepreneurial academics). At each stage of the process the algorithm merges the two clusters that have the smallest centroid distance, i.e. the two clusters whose distance between the mean vectors is the smallest.

  12. A cluster analysis performed with respect to 2004–2006 already shows the presence of two clusters that have the features of the quasi-entrepreneurial groups and the locally engaged. We do not report the results here, as they largely coincide with the ones that are displayed in Fig. 1.

  13. Unlike the cluster of engaged academics, which has an important local base, only 20% of the contracts signed by the quasi-entrepreneurs are with local companies. The remaining 80% is mainly composed of contracts with firms located in other Italian regions.

  14. These details come from the analysis of contracts signed by academics and their external partners.

  15. The number of academics involved, as shown in the Tables 3, 4 and 5 in the appendix, goes from 406 to 382. However, the university population at UNIFI strongly decreases from 2336 academics as of the 31th of December 2006 to 1771 academics as of the 31th December 2013 (data from the Italian Ministry of Education and Research, available at http://cercauniversita.cineca.it; accessed on 28 January 2019). This dramatic shrinking was due to the almost complete interruption of the turnover of academic (and administrative) staff from 2008 to 2013, made necessary by the need to recover from a condition of financial difficulties. The difficulties have been managed and overcome in the period.

  16. Data from a presentation of the activities of the incubator the 6th July 2015. See also https://www.unifi.it/vp-5965-incubatore-universitario-fare-impresa.html, accessed the 29th November 2019.

  17. See the database on Italian spin-offs at https://www.spinoffitalia.it/?q=download, accessed on 2019, the 29th of January. The official (slightly different from the record of that database) number of spin-offs acknowledged by UNIFI increased from 8 (constituted before 2010) to 40 (up to 2015).

  18. The direct interview to professor V and his research group was performed on December 4th, 2018 and lasted about one hour. The interview was recorded and later transcribed.

  19. The direct interview to professor D and his research group was performed on March 1st, 2018 and lasted about one hour. The interview was recorded and later transcribed.

  20. The list of technology districts promoted by Tuscany Region can be found at: http://www.regione.toscana.it/-/distretti-tecnologici-della-toscana, accessed on 2019, the 29th of November.

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Acknowledgements

A version of this paper has been presented at the 2018 Regional Innovation Policies Conference, Bergen (Norway), October 11–12. We express our gratitude to the audience for helpful discussion. We acknowledge support from Fondazione Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, project “Strategie competitive ed azioni di marketing per i centri di ricerca, gli spin-off ed i servizi all’innovazione dell’ateneo fiorentino”. We also thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments.

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  1. Department of Economics and Management, University of Florence, Via delle Pandette, 9, 50124, Florence, Italy

    Marco Bellandi, Annalisa Caloffi & Sara De Masi

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  1. Marco Bellandi
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  2. Annalisa Caloffi
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Correspondence to Marco Bellandi.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.

Table 3 Descriptive statistics 2007–2009
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Table 4 Descriptive statistics 2011–2013
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Table 5 Descriptive statistics of the clusters identified in 2007–2009 and in 2011–2013
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Table 6 Descriptive statistics of the new entries, exits and stayers
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Table 7 Descriptive statistics of the stayers by type of cluster (means)
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Table 8 Descriptive statistics of the new entries by type of cluster
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Table 9 Descriptive statistics of the exits by type of cluster
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Bellandi, M., Caloffi, A. & De Masi, S. Bottom-level organizational changes within entrepreneurial and engaged models of university: insights from Italy. J Technol Transf 46, 907–932 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-020-09805-6

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