How can universities contribute to regional competitiveness policy-making?

This paper aims to contribute to understanding regional competitiveness policy-making and the role academic organisations can play in that process. Competitiveness policies have evolved in the past decades from a single to a multiple-domain field, which has made the policy-making process more complex by adding more actors with their particular experience and view. This complexity, together with the relevance of overcoming traditional policy implementation failures, pleads for a new approach to competitiveness policy-making, in which academic organisations can act as “anchor institutions”. This framework is based on the adaptive implementation concept.