Universities' Impact on Regional Economic and Innovation Performance. A Hungariran Subregional Analysis

Several success stories prove that universities are able to significantly influence regional economic and innovation performance. Partially due to this fact a number of regions created development strategies to strengthen the regional effects of universities and to motivate the academic sphere for a more intense involvement in regional economic development. In spite of this, it is not at all obvious whether universities' significant regional contribution is a rule or rather an exception. On the top of this the validity of the relevant results of the literature cannot be unambiguously extended to transition economies. Present paper aims to measure the contribution of Hungarian higher education institutions (HEIs) to regional economic and innovation performance. On the one hand, we attempt to adapt the methodology of a former US study of Goldstein and Renault to a transition economy, and instead of regional to subregional (LAU-1) level. One the other hand, we expand the focus of their method and connect the role of universities to complex territorial innovation performance, especially to knowledge exploitation ability. We conclude that HEIs have significant contribution to overall local innovation performance, but very limited contribution to the knowledge exploitation ability. This contribution is way too forceless to result in the dynamic improvement of the local economic performance or in the rise of the local incomes.