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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License Newcastle University ePrints-eprint.ncl.ac.uk Goddard J, Coombes M, Kempton L, Vallance P. Universities as anchor institutions in cities in a turbulent funding environment: vulnerable institutions and vulnerable places in England.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Over the last decades, the role, scale and mission of higher education has been transformed, from institutions which were attended by a small intellectual or social elite to a situation where attendance is more or less obligatory for the vast majority of people in order to successfully sustain most occupations and uphold democratic civil society. New institutional models have evolved and are still evolving in response to a myriad of drivers, including understanding of knowledge and modes of creation and dissemination, and societal and labour market requirements. Indeed, the positioning of knowledge as the foundation of economic, social and political power has put greater focus on higher education institutions (HEIs) placing them at the centre of policy-making. And because higher education is one of the most internationalised sectors of society, global factors are increasingly paramount. Thus higher education is, of necessity, becoming increasingly complex, combining attributes of being a peopleprocessing institution with a knowledge-producing mission (Gumport, 2000), with national and geopolitical characteristics and implications. Within the European Union many actions and deliberations are focused on mobilising and harnessing the full potential of universities to underpin Europe's economic recovery, and future economic and social development. Because higher education has become a barometer of national and institutional competitiveness, global rankings of universities have assumed disproportionate significance (Hazelkorn, 2015). Universities are continually measured, and funded, according to indicators based primarily around academic prestige. In doing so, higher education policy has unwittingly promoted a model of university disconnected from the nation-state and constituent cities and regions as it concentrates on diversifying and privatising its funding base, recruiting talent internationally and engaging globally.

This paper reports evidence from two studies conducted in nine British universities into individual academic and institutional perspectives on research impact. We analyse our findings in the context of global developments in performance measurement. Mechanisms for assessing the quality of research and associated knowledge exchange serve a dual purpose: used retrospectively, they enable public funding agencies to hold universities to account for the monies they have received and, looking forward, they allow those same agencies to incentivise desired activities or outcomes. Whilst existing mechanisms offer seemingly attractive, albeit contested, ways of pursuing the former, we particularly question their effectiveness in achieving the latter goal. We observe among our respondents a wide variety of intended impacts and mechanisms for pursuing them, and argue that this renders any monitoring and reward system based on achieved outcomes prone to complexity and lack of comprehensiveness. By contrast, a high level of consistency in motivationsacross institutions and disciplinespoints to a focus on the process of knowledge exchange as a far more effective driver. We identify a key role for university managers in fostering academic engagement in knowledge exchange. Ultimately, however, we conclude that effective incentivisation is likely to depend on the replacement of impact-based evaluations with a new, process-based approach.

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This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in the Cambridge Journal of Economics following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version [Camb. J. Econ.

Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) has, thus far, neglected the contribution of universities to innovation processes in its emerging theoretical explanations of territorial economic change. This paper begins to address this conceptual gap by outlining a perspective on the ways in which universities, as organizations with institutional features and functions that are distinctive to those of firms, can enhance the adaptive capacity of national or regional economies. The argument developed is based on a complexity theory view of system selftransformation and supports greater attention to this framework in a pluralistic EEG.

There is a growing academic and policy interest in the notion of using cities as ‘living laboratories’ to develop and test responses to the social, environmental and economic challenges present in contemporary urbanism. These living laboratories are often assumed to function through ‘quadruple helix’ relations between varied actors from the public, private, university and community sectors. However, empirical research that explores the real-world functioning of these arrangements is comparatively limited. This paper will help address this gap through the case of Newcastle City Futures (NCF) – a university-anchored platform for collaborative urban foresight research, public engagement and innovation. In particular, the paper will concentrate on a two-year period when NCF focused on the facilitation of innovation demonstrator projects guided by the vision of Newcastle upon Tyne developing a postindustrial future as a ‘test-bed city’. Detailed empirical accounts of the development of two demonstrator projects are used to illustrate and analyse processes of cross-sectoral collaboration and engaging the public in co-design. These are used to support the conceptual argument that the presence of the quadruple helix as a form of local innovation system should not be taken as given. Instead, the collaborative relationships required for transformational interventions in the future of cities need to be actively constructed by diverse actors and supported by intermediary vehicles such as NCF.