Work together to harness higher education’s potential

By Sue Brownlow. Some areas of Europe struggle economically because of their remote locations: hundreds of kilometres from the centres of power, with sparse populations and few large businesses, their employment prospects and skills levels are often poor, and wages low.
In other places, infrastructure may be better and populations higher but the regional will to change things for the better may have been hampered by years of under-investment or political inertia. A recently completed three-year European Union (EU) project has brought together higher education, business and the public sector to focus on the needs of regional economies in geographically remote areas, where traditional industries are often in decline. Led by Cornwall, one of the UK’s peripheral regions, the University Collaboration in Regional Development Spaces project – or UNICREDS – has developed important insights into how higher education can play a key role in boosting struggling economies by working with businesses and public sector partners.
As Project Manager Nicolas Wallet says: “If policy formers take just one lesson from the findings of this project it should be that when higher education works closely with businesses and communities, and with governments and administrations, it can not only transform regions, it can make that transformation sustainable.”
As well as Cornwall, UNICREDS partners were drawn from several regions of Europe including the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, Northern Sweden, the South Ostrobothnia region in Finland, Southern Bohemia in the Czech Republic, the North Central Region of Bulgaria and the North Great Plain region of Hungary. UNICREDS partners have worked closely together, identifying examples of current good practice from their regions, some responding to unique circumstances but many providing generic lessons for national and pan-European decision-makers.
The strength of these lessons is that they are not based on a single region’s experience, but on practice shared, considered and debated across seven quite different European regions.
Sharing good practice across regions
One of the principal UNICREDS partners has been the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC), an unusual partnership of six UK higher education institutions operating in the far south-west of the country, using university-level education to help local people, businesses and communities to thrive. For us at CUC, the UNICREDS project has been about learning from on another and we’ve had a clear focus on using those lessons locally.
In Finland you’ll find world-class forestry research, developed in collaboration with industry and directly reflecting the local economy. Scotland funds some very small higher education centres at the heart of remote island communities, enabling people to gain higher-level skills without leaving their local areas and helping keep those communities sustainable.
Across Europe, innovation centres where businesses and universities can collaborate, and shared campuses where two or more universities collaborate to provide excellent facilities, are now part of the landscape, as they are here in Cornwall, and UNICREDS has helped us all to get the best from these innovations. The project’s closing conference took place on 25 October in Cornwall and attracted more than 50 delegates from across Europe to see how new initiatives based on outcomes from the UNICREDS project are already influencing regional policy.
The central result of the project has been clear confirmation that higher education contributes most effectively to regional economic development when it works together with local or regional government and businesses. Known as a ‘triple helix partnership’, this approach has been at the heart of the UNICREDS project. The project identifies innovative ways in which universities can focus on the needs of their local and regional economies in shaping their academic offerings and curricula, their modes of delivery and their research and knowledge transfer activities.
Stimulating demand for university-level activity has been a shared challenge for most of the UNICREDS partners, and the project has also helped identify the most effective ways of encouraging businesses, especially small and micro-businesses, to work with universities and colleges to build competitiveness, increase the adoption of higher-level skills and employ new graduates.
Key policy recommendations
A key component of both the final report and the conference is the wealth of good-practice case studies collated throughout the three-year project.
These act as a ‘toolkit’ for other EU regions facing similar challenges, as well as also providing evidence to support the report’s key policy recommendations, which include:

• A need for the EU to motivate and help universities to contribute to their regional development, in collaboration with regional government and businesses.
• A flexible approach to collaborative working between higher education, business and the public sector.
• Encouragement for policy-makers to provide additional support to overcome the distance, both geographical and cultural, between regional government, universities, businesses and communities.
• The freeing of EU funding from conditions that unintentionally limit access to support for micro-businesses and small and medium enterprises.
• A clear need for the public sector to take a strong lead in establishing a vision and ambition for regional economic development.

It quickly became clear to all of us involved in this project that our local circumstances and national higher education policies were very different, and that because of this a good practice in one region could not simply be copied across the partners. Rather, the project offers a toolkit of ideas that have worked in particular policy, social and business environments and which, with proper reflection, can offer pointers to other regions wishing to embark on their own development journey.
‘Smart specialisation’ encourages regions to identify and build on their competitive strengths in research, innovation and higher-level skills. This project has shown how universities working with business, social and community partners can play a powerful role in driving this development in remote regions. The project has now come to an end, but we are confident that the results will have an important impact on people across Europe.
Another UNICREDS partner, Sandra Rothwell, head of economic development at Cornwall Council, has clear views on the project’s success: “UNICREDS has helped to highlight some big opportunities for Europe’s underperforming regional economies,” she says.
“The story that is beginning to emerge is how higher education working effectively with businesses and the public sector is transforming people’s lives, helping their communities grow economically and socially, and helping regions that have struggled for many years to face the future with confidence.” Further information about the project and the final report are available here.
* Sue Brownlow is director of Combined Universities in Cornwall.
* UNICREDS is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and made possible by the INTERREG IVC programme. It involves 14 partners from seven EU regions who share the belief that universities can help transform deprived regional economies into centres of excellence in research and innovation. The aim of the UNICREDS programme is to share knowledge between the member partners, to further develop the triple helix model, and ultimately to lobby EU policy-makers to adopt the model across Europe.
UNICREDS partners
1. Cornwall Council, UK
2. Combined Universities in Cornwall, UK
3. Municipality of Skellefteå, Sweden
4. Regional Council of Västerbotten, Sweden
5. Akademi Norr, Sweden
6. City of Seinäjoki, Finland
7. Frami Ltd, Finland
8. University of South Bohemia, Czech Republic
9. South Bohemia Regional Authority, Czech Republic
10. Ministry of Regional Development and Public Works, Bulgaria
11. Sofia University, Bulgaria
12. University of Debrecen, Hungary
13. Institutional Maintenance Centre Hajdú-Bihar, Hungary
14. UHI, University of the Highlands and Islands.