Abstract:In the UK, the boundary spanning role has taken on greater significance as successive governments emphasize how universities should play in direct knowledge transfer and changing academics' visions over third mission functions. Studies in the UK have focused on the relative performance of technology transfer organizations (TTOs) / knowledge transfer organizations (KTOs) or their use by academics and external organizations. Compared to their US and international counterparts, TTOs/KTOs at UK universities exhibit low-levels of absolute efficiency. Therefore questions remain relating to how to raise the efficiency and productivity of these units, how to attract and train staff with suitable qualifications/capabilities and how to change adverse attitudes towards knowledge exchange by some academics. Currently, there is a lack of a holistic view of these functions and the way they complement each other or coordinate their activities. This study addresses this gap in theory and practice and advances how universities should provide consistency in both the internal and the external interfaces, by the offer of a framework and key stakeholder insights.

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With university-industry engagement forming an integral part of the policy agenda, this paper underlines current issues and emerging themes in the dedicated literature. It utilises a comprehensive literature review, based on evidence from peer-reviewed journals/public reports published after 2005 in the UK. The paper integrates a wide range of disparate studies on university-industry knowledge transfer patterns, determinants and impacts, and offers a panorama that could be useful to inform on the variety of issues underlying knowledge transfer. Given the importance/complexity of university-industry interactions, a comprehensive study fills an existing gap. Second, due to its focus on current issues, the study opens the way to reflections and debates on critically 'unanswered' questions: how to deal with diversity/heterogeneity? How to increase quality in supply/quantity in demand for knowledge? How to increase impact on academics, universities, firms, economy and society?

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"This study examines the territorial patterns of innovation in Romania, a country labelled as ‘modest innovator’. Our main assumption is that the large heterogeneity in the sub-national innovation patterns is not captured in the typologies developed for the NUTS2 regions. Consequently, the study proposes a categorization of the Romanian NUTS3 counties according to their innovation performance and structural characteristics, by means of a two-step factor analysis combined with hierarchical cluster analysis. The results point to the existence of five territorial groupings with similar characteristics: knowledge-intensive hubs, technology-intensive platforms, diversified agglomerations, industrial production zones and structurally challenged regions. Taken together, the results suggest the need to prioritize structural transformation and embrace the broad-based innovation concept."

Motivation: There is plenty of evidence suggesting that the (regional) innovation systems in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are in their early beginnings and that this poses huge challenges to the implementation of the smart specialization agendas and to the efficient use of the European structural and investment funds in these countries. Our assumption is that structural differences explain to a large extent the differences in innovation performance between the CEE and non-CEE regions and that the future growth trajectories of the CEE regions should more specifically embrace the broad-based innovation concept.Aim: Our study attempts to test whether there are statistically significant differences between the CEE and non-CEE regions in each component of the European Regional Innovation Scoreboard and whether such differences can be explained by the variations in structural conditions. To this purpose, we use a discriminant factor analysis and test the correlations between the discriminant function and various structural indicators.