Full text via link. Interview met Lex van Teeffelen. Van Teeffelen is lector bedrijfsoverdracht en innovatie. Dat zal veel mensen niet zo aantrekkelijk in de oren klinken. Want bedrijfsoverdrachten, dat klinkt al gauw als iets ingewikkelds met veel geld en zo. Niet iets reëels voor een student. Dan ligt starten als zzp-er en langzaam verder bouwen aan een eigen bedrijf meer voor de hand. Zou je denken. Maar daar denkt Van Teeffelen dus anders over. Heel anders.
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The role of (entrepreneurial) universities as change agents in regional economic development has been highlighted before, but how they can drive regional sustainable development in developing countries has been largely neglected hitherto. Using qualitative methods, we show how being confronted with adverse poverty and pollution in the local context, can drive a university to develop a sustainability vision that accordingly becomes the driver of institutional change. We demonstrate how local campus leadership, a holistic teaching and research program, and student involvement ensued significant local effects in the short run. Yet, we also show how liabilities of smallness hinders the creation of significant sustainable local impact. Instead, the campus became an incubation space for novel institutional practices for regional development. Indeed, the most promising initiatives were spun back into the original campus for their scale-up phase. This study advances insights on the entrepreneurial university by, first, presenting universities as drivers for sustainable change through education and outreach rather than via traditional commercialization activities, notably in developing countries. Second, it shows the risks and value of creating a separate space for novel concepts for sustainable development to be tested out before bringing these back to the principal location.
This paper explores innovative approaches to stimulating the uptake of existing climate technologies for mitigation and adaptation. Such innovations can be identified in the following areas: how technology options are selected by countries (i.e. as part of low-emission and climate-resilient pathways); how stakeholder views and practitioner knowledge, as well as their preferences, are solicited in climate technology planning; what financial innovations exist for enhancing funding of technology projects and programmes; and what are viable ways of enhancing private sector engagement and incubators.
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In opdracht van de gemeente Groningen heeft het lectoraat Vastgoed een actueel totaaloverzicht gemaakt van de creatieve en innovatieve werklocaties in de stad: kortweg ‘broedplaatsen’. Deze plekken omvatten het volledige spectrum van ateliergebouwen tot en met startup-incubators: van creatief tot innovatief, en van cultureel tot commercieel. De inventarisatie bestond uit het in kaart brengen van het huidige locatieaanbod en het spiegelen van de toekomstbestendigheid hiervan in het licht van de verwachte ontwikkelingen aan vraag- en aanbodzijde op middellange termijn.
SOCIO-BEE proposes that community engagement and social innovation combined with Citizen Science (CS) through emerging technologies and playful interaction can bridge the gap between the capacity of communities to adopt more sustainable behaviours aligned with environmental policy objectives and between the citizen intentions and the real behaviour to act in favour of the environment (in this project, to reduce air pollution). Furthermore, community engagement can raise other citizens’ awareness of climate change and their own responses to it, through experimentation, better monitoring, and observation of the environment. This idea is emphasised in this project through the metaphor of bees’ behaviour (with queens, working and drone bees as main CS actors), interested stakeholders that aim at learning from results of CS evidence-based research (honey bears) and the Citizen Science hives as incubators of CS ideas and projects that will be tested in three different pilot sites (Ancona, Marousi and Ancona) and with different population: elderly people, everyday commuters and young adults, respectively. The SOCIO-BEE project ambitions the scalable activation of changes in citizens’ behaviour in support of pro-environment action groups, local sponsors, voluntary sector and policies in cities. This process will be carried out through low-cost technological innovations (CS enablers within the SOCIO BEE platform), together with the creation of proper instruments for institutions (Whitebook and toolkits with recommendations) that will contribute to the replication, upscaling, massive adoption and to the duration of the SOCIO-BEE project. The solution sustainability and maximum outreach will be ensured by proposing a set of public-private partnerships.For more information see the EU-website.
