Entrepreneurial universities and academic entrepreneurship

Does the presence of the university affect residents’ perceived quality of life? An empirical investigation

Angelo Riviezzo. Maria Rosaria Napolitano, Giancarlo Ragozini

Over the last decades, the role that the university may play to contribute to the social, cultural and economic development of the community in which it operates has been largely investigated. New theoretical frameworks have been developed and a debate around the performance metrics and indicators that it is possible to use in order to assess the impact of university activities soon emerged (Riviezzo et al., 2019a). As a matter of fact, if universities are now supposed to contribute to the economic development, but also to show a civic engagement or civic responsibility within the community, the city and region of which they are part (e.g., Chatterton and Goddard, 2000; Thornton and Jaeger, 2008; Goddard, 2009; Goddard and Vallance, 2013; Fini et al., 2018; Carayannis et al., 2018; Riviezzo et al., 2019b), it is clear that new approaches to the assessment of university activities become necessary. However, research on measures and indicators of universities activities is, to a large extent, still very scant (e.g., Urbano and Guerrero, 2013; Mazdeh et al., 2013; Schmitz et al., 2017; Riviezzo et al., 2020). For instance, the impact of the presence of the university on the host community perceived quality of life, to the best of our knowledge, hasn’t been explored so far.

May the presence of the university in a place affect residents’ perceived quality of life? How? The main aim of this study is to try to address these questions, by identifying the specific university activities that have an impact on the perceived quality of life in the place where university operates. To this aim, we aimed at developing and statistically validating a new scale to assess the impact of the presence of the university on the host community perceived quality of life.

#civic engagement #community engagement #Italy #quality of life #Scale development #survey #university