In the twenty-first century, universities are part of systems of innovation spanning the globe. While there is nothing new in universities' links with industry, what is recent is their role as territorial actors. It is government policy in many countries that universities, and in some countries national laboratories, stimulate regional or local economic development. They are expected to be at the heart of networked structures contributing to the growth of productive knowledge-oriented clusters.Universities, Innovation and the Economy explores the implications of this expectation. Its purpose is to situate this new role within the context of broader political histories, comparing how countries in Europe and North America have balanced the traditional roles of teaching and research with that of exploitation of research and defining a territorial role.Helen Lawton Smith highlights how pressure, both from the state and from industry, has produced new paradigms of accountability that include responsibilities for regional development. This book utilizes empirical evidence gained from studies conducted in both North America and Europe to provide an overview of the changing geography of universityindustry links.

BackgroundWhile the European Union is striving to become the ‘Innovation Union’, there remains a lack of quantifiable indicators to compare and benchmark regional innovation clusters. To address this issue, a HealthTIES (Healthcare, Technology and Innovation for Economic Success) consortium was funded by the European Union’s Regions of Knowledge initiative, research and innovation funding programme FP7. HealthTIES examined whether the health technology innovation cycle was functioning differently in five European regional innovation clusters and proposed regional and joint actions to improve their performance. The clusters included BioCat (Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain), Medical Delta (Leiden, Rotterdam and Delft, South Holland, Netherlands), Oxford and Thames Valley (United Kingdom), Life Science Zürich (Switzerland), and Innova Észak-Alföld (Debrecen, Hungary).MethodsAppreciation of the ‘triple helix’ of university–industry–government innovation provided the impetus for the development of two quantifiable innovation indexes and related indicators. The HealthTIES H-index is calculated for disease and technology platforms based on the h-index proposed by Hirsch. The HealthTIES Innovation Index is calculated for regions based on 32 relevant quantitative and discriminative indicators grouped into 12 categories and 3 innovation phases, namely ‘Input’ (n = 12), ‘Innovation System’ (n = 9) and ‘Output’ (n = 11).ResultsThe HealthTIES regions had developed relatively similar disease and technology platform profiles, yet with distinctive strengths and weaknesses. The regional profiles of the innovation cycle in each of the three phases were surprisingly divergent. Comparative assessments based on the indicators and indexes helped identify and share best practice and inform regional and joint action plans to strengthen the competitiveness of the HealthTIES regions.ConclusionThe HealthTIES indicators and indexes provide useful practical tools for the measurement and benchmarking of university–industry–government innovation in European medical and life science clusters. They are validated internally within the HealthTIES consortium and appear to have a degree of external prima facie validity. Potentially, the tools and accompanying analyses can be used beyond the HealthTIES consortium to inform other regional governments, researchers and, possibly, large companies searching for their next location, analyse and benchmark ‘triple helix’ dynamics within their own networks over time, and to develop integrated public–private and cross-regional research and innovation strategies in Europe and beyond.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12961-019-0414-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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We are now at the cusp of attaining the conditions needed for gender equality and equity in academic science. However, traditional academic science cultures are high walls, and those barriers have not yet fully been breached. Women now can enter many previously male-dominated academic fields but are still under-represented in higher positions. The socalled 'pipeline' thesis -encourage entry at the lower levels on the premise that with time, the increase will filter up to the higher levels -has led to the founding of numerous programmes and projects to encourage girls and young women to engage with science, technology and mathematics. An 'assisted pipeline' has worked up to and including PhD programmes and entry level positions in many academic science fields. However, it has been noted that the pipeline is 'leaky', with women being lost in ever greater proportions as they ascend the academic ladder (mixing metaphors). Indeed, their paucity at advanced levels is so great, with little -if anyimprovement over the past 30 years, that it has been held that the pipeline is broken (see Etzkowitz et al., Chapter 19 in this volume).As Paula England (2010) has argued more broadly, the gender revolution has 'stalled'. A simple funnel mechanism, an educational system attached to a pipeline with a 'capillary action' flow, propelling upward mobility of individuals expected to rise by virtue of increased input, has failed to produce equity, let alone equality. Instead, it has transmogrified into a mechanical model of an engine that has seized up and stopped running, at least temporarily, and is in stasis. In a ground vehicle, such as an automobile, a stall is inconvenient but not usually fatal unless a following vehicle runs into the stopped one. The academic system has proved resistant and resilient in the face of pressures to change. It bends, accepting gender research programmes, and is resilient, promoting relatively few female scientists, who generally accept the male model of science, thus keeping the existing system intact. Nevertheless, there are men and women scientists who attempt to innovate a female 'family friendly' model, balancing work and life with a private sphere, that an increasing number of

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