The Impact of HEIs on Regional Development: Facts and Practices of Collaborative Work With SMEs

"Higher education institutions have a task in providing education and research, but they are also increasingly expanding their goals to include a social task. They try to contribute to social transition tasks and exert a meaningful influence on their environment. The book The Impact of HEIs on Regional Development – Facts and Practices of Collaborative Work with SMEs is about the collaboration between education and small and medium-sized businesses in the same region. The context of the research described often concerns a few specific higher education institutions in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Brazil that are actively working on this topic. With a description of sixteen case studies of varying size and quality, the researchers emphasize the pedagogical side. What does it mean for students and teachers to collaborate on issues with small and medium-sized companies in the region? Occasionally the impact on companies is also discussed: what does it require of them? What does it gain them? Students generally experience education in and with practice as positive. Although there are of course differences: for example, a case study about a collaboration between a French and a Brazilian institution to train the engineer of the future together with technical partners, only met with enthusiasm among Brazilian students. Teachers also generally experience this education fairly positively, but they do find it leads to an increase in workload. Whether students are more equipped to tackle the complex problems of the future is not investigated. The business community mainly sees the advantage of coming into contact with young talent at an early stage, making it easier for them to connect with them. In the last two chapters (through literature reviews), the book takes an excursion into the consequences for, for example, policy choices of higher education institutions. There is also a lot of attention for entrepreneurship, transversal and innovative competencies. the authors emphasize its necessity; there is a great need for it from the business community, but there is also great diversity in its interpretation. Various studies search for a common foundation within and between different regions for, for example, the concept of entrepreneurial competence. The various case studies do not specify what they mean by 'impact on the region', nor do they measure it. What becomes very clear from the various case studies is that bringing together the two worlds – education and business – does not happen automatically. It requires 'new' forms of education in co-creation with the business community. What is valuable about the case studies is that they describe in detail how researchers tackled matters, what hurdles they had to overcome, etc. In this way, they offer a lot of insight into practice, which can help higher education institutions that are working on the same task. The book would be even stronger if it created a common thread in an introductory and a concluding chapter and answered a research question that transcends all these studies."