Along the Pathway of University Missions

Abstract

Over the last decades, the pressure on the university to facilitate direct application and exploitation of its knowledge and capabilities to contribute to social, cultural, and economic development has steadily increased. As a result, new missions have been recognized to universities, new theoretical frameworks have been developed, and new university models have been proposed, including the “entrepreneurial university”, the “civic university”, the “community-engaged university”, the “transformative university” or the “interconnected university”. Thus, a corresponding advancement of performance metrics and indicators used to assess the impact of university activities is required. Through a bibliometric and then a critical review of the extant literature, this study provides: i) an overall picture of the state-of-art of literature on universities' missions and roles in regional development; ii) a systematisation of the contributions on performance measures and indicators of universities' activities.

Stakeholder Participation in Planning of a Sustainable and Competitive Tourism Destination: The Genoa Integrated Action Plan

“…Radinger-Peer [91] argues that engagement is a multifaceted phenomenon that is difficult to delimit; it is characterized by at least a dual nature: on the one hand, engagement takes the form of linear and direct knowledge transfer activities; on the other hand, it involves contributions that emerge from formal and informal participation in regional networks, collective action and co-production of knowledge with various actors from multiple contexts. Riviezzo and co-workers [92] propose the concept of the fourth mission, which would be aligned with all actions to promote the social, cultural and economic development of the host community, contributing to the community's perceived quality of life. Universities are then encouraged to perceive themselves as open systems in relation to their environment; in this context, the effectiveness of contributions increases using a whole range of participatory methodologies and techniques, such as Community-Based Research (CBR), deliberative science, bottom-up approaches to citizen participation in science, participatory technology assessment and citizen science, Decision Theatre and game testing [93].…”