Universities, public research, and evolutionary economic geography

Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) has, thus far, neglected the contribution of universities to innovation processes in its emerging theoretical explanations of territorial economic change. This article begins to address this conceptual gap by outlining a perspective on the ways in which universities, as organizations with institutional features and functions that are distinctive to those of firms, can enhance the adaptive capacity of national or regional economies. The argument developed is based on a complexity theory view of system self-transformation and supports greater attention to this framework in a pluralistic EEG.