Abstract
The attitudes of university faculty towards the expansion of universities’ missions to include assisting regional economic development and technology development by knowledge commercialization are analysed. Based upon surveys of faculty in the EU and in the United States, as well as secondary data on the institutional characteristics of universities and their regional economic conditions, we find that faculty are significantly more supportive of their universities assisting regional economic development compared to knowledge commercialization that attitudes between the US and EU faculty are remarkably similar, and that individual factors, including academic discipline, are more powerful explanators of the variation in attitudes compared to institutional characteristics or regional economic conditions.
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Notes
A re-sorting of functions may result in a clearer division of labour among universities, with some oriented more to internationally competitive basic research and others to locally or industrially oriented applied research (LERU 2006). The term “mission creep” has also been used to describe the tendency for institutions of higher education that wish to offer more advanced degrees or disciplines, begin or expand research programs, or accrete new functions that help serve local and national interests, all of which exceed the institution’s original charter.
On the other hand, universities in Baltic countries have been given sole responsibility for basic research in an effort to rid their research and innovation systems of previous Soviet-style, top-down research systems dominated by ideologically driven academies of science, a model that may still survive in other EU-10 countries.
No non-response bias was found after comparing the sample respondents to the full study population along several descriptors including rank, discipline, gender, type of university, and region of the United States
Unlike all other EU countries, the French system of university web-pages proved extraordinarily difficult to identify academics or their e-mail addresses. We therefore sampled the French universities and disciplines of authors listed within the ISI database. This probably introduces a slight bias towards greater research and less teaching or for journal- versus book-based publications. We subsequently learned others had similar experiences in attempts to survey French university academics.
The estimates of each of the fully specified models are available from the corresponding author upon request.
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Acknowledgments
The research reported here has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement \(\text{ n}^{\circ }\) 216813, the Kauffman Foundation, and the Carolina Entrepreneurship Initiative at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Goldstein, H., Bergman, E.M. & Maier, G. University mission creep? Comparing EU and US faculty views of university involvement in regional economic development and commercialization. Ann Reg Sci 50, 453–477 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-012-0513-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-012-0513-5