University and the innovation ecosystem: structured literature review

Universities are becoming increasingly active players in innovation environments, adding value to regional development processes and supporting the importance of knowledge in the innovation ecosystem, thus generating innovation from knowledge. This study aims to investigate the scientific literature on the university theme and the innovation ecosystem in recent years. The research is classified as descriptive and exploratory. The process of selecting the collection of articles for analysis resulted in 34 articles in line with the research theme in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The bibliometric analysis identified that the articles were written by 92 authors and coauthors, published in 30 periodicals between 2006 and 2018 in 22 countries, 62 educational institutions, and present a set of 69 keywords. It is concluded through content analysis that universities have taken on a more entrepreneurial role as central players within the innovation ecosystems, resulting in new and diverse opportunities. The selected studies also showed that university-industry collaboration is the most important dimension of an innovation ecosystem. However, the literature also points out that there must be greater interaction between government, industry and universities within an innovative context. Therefore, this points to the need for studies like this that explore the role of universities in the innovation ecosystem.