Universities and Collaboration within Complex, Uncertain Knowledge-Based Economies

I suggest that outstanding scholarship, within the university sector, will continue to rely on smooth integration between teaching, industry collaboration and research. As such, I question the likelihood of a wholesale change in the nature of the University due to the well-known pressures emanating from innovations in the information and communications technology sector. In the critical accounting literature, research into the implications for accounting practice of market and technology uncertainty is increasingly prominent. One effect of this uncertainty is to draw marketing and innovation activities together more closely, in a strictly spatial sense. To identify this and other sources of " proximity effects " in the innovation process, I examine three contrasting theoretical perspectives: evolutionary economics, the new growth theory and transaction cost theory. In addition, I review Keynesian perspectives on uncertainty and innovation and draw on two Marshallian notions: on one hand, the significance of economies that are external to the firm but internal to the industry; and on the other hand, the importance of the industrial milieu in reducing uncertainty. At the same time, I demonstrate that all of the above schools of thought describe powerful transformative forces that are working to promote cluster formation, networking and inter-firm collaboration. I link findings in this literature to my arguments about the future of university, arguing that university research and industrial collaboration will inevitably continue to exhibit a strong regional and site-specific dependency.