The UK Government’s growth mission aims to kickstart a decade of national renewal in order to drive growth and raise living standards in every part of the country.

The Industrial Strategy green paper has emphasised both the type of growth targeted (economic, inclusive, sustainable, resilient) and where to concentrate efforts (city regions, high-potential clusters, and strategic industrial sites, particularly those outside London and the South-East).

Universities, as regional anchor institutions, have significant potential to help deliver these ambitions, including through knowledge exchange (KE) activities.

But realising this potential is hampered by a lack of fit-for-purpose data and metrics. This constrains the ability of public funders of KE to:

• Effectively allocate funding to enable universities to contribute more actively, strategically, and systemically to regional growth
• Monitor and evaluate performance of such funding programmes
• Enable strategic learning by universities within the system to drive innovation and improvement in delivery of growth impacts

Research England (who allocate KE funding to universities in England at the organisation-level) and UCI are now exploring how to improve data and metrics capturing the health and performance of university contributions to regional economic growth through KE.

In our Introduction to Research and Innovation Policy for Regional Growth report, we distil theoretical and practical policy insights concerning how research and innovation (R&I) interface with regional economic development processes, including:

• How R&I policy and regional development policy have evolved and increasingly inform each other
• The different growth theories that have influenced these evolutions
• How established and emerging thinking from research and from practice – including the US (Regional Innovation Engines), EU (Smart specialisation and Innovation for Place-based Transformation) and UK (Strength in Places Fund) – can inform a strategic approach for the orientation, design and implementation of regionally focused R&I policy

Download the Introduction to Research and Innovation Policy for Regional Growth report here

In our Powering Regional Engines of Growth insight paper, we use these insights to distinguish between two important levels at which universities can contribute to regional economic growth:

• Enabling partners in places – working with partners located within the university’s region to develop their assets and capabilities, enabling and supporting them to better collaborate, innovate and compete, and to commercialise ideas and technologies that create new opportunities for value creation for the region
• Transforming places – working with local partners and stakeholders to develop the wider assets, capabilities and conditions critical for dynamically strengthening regional innovation and competitiveness

We also identify five key roles through which universities can harness their capabilities, infrastructure and networks to support regional growth:

• Generating – creating new knowledge and translating and commercialising new ideas and technologies
• Supporting – applying knowledge and resources to support regional innovators
• Connecting (or boundary spanning) – acting as intermediaries to facilitate relationships and networks within the region and into other regions
• Developing – strengthening the conditions and capacities/capabilities of the region to create and capture value
• Transforming – supporting regional sustainability transitions and mission-oriented innovation

Download the UCI Expert Insights paper here.

Download the UCI Policy Briefing note here

In ongoing work, we’re using these insights to explore how UK universities are approaching the national growth mission, and how they are managing shortfalls in currently available KE data and metrics to inform their strategic approach.