The present paper investigates the role of the located Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the transformation towards sustainability of the city of Linz as well as the region of Upper Austria. We argue that HEIs have the potential to spur a regional transition towards sustainability via the channels of teaching, research and outreach. We furthermore take into account that organisational- and field-level drivers influence the role of HEIs within the regional transition paths towards sustainability (RTPS). We chose an explorative research design in order to give a realistic picture of the potentials and limitations of HEIs’ involvement in regional transitions to sustainability. The role of the five HEIs located in the city of Linz is studied through in-depth expert interviews and a comprehensive document analysis. The investigation reveals that there is no contribution of HEIs as a whole to RTPS, but that the impact is dependent on individual highly engaged “frontrunners” enacting change and at the same time on leadership from the university management. Moreover, regulative drivers at the field-level and normative as well as cognitive drivers at the organisational-level affect HEIs’ contribution.

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and their relations to regional development have raised political expectations and scientific interest since the middle of the twentieth century. The high number of scientific surveys conducted calls for a meta-analysis that integrates multidisciplinary case study results. This secondary case survey analysis offers new insights into the scientific knowledge base on HEI-region relations. Knowledge gaps as well as uncertain, single and cross case verified knowledge could be identified. Whereas the unilateral HEIs’ impacts on the region have been broadly analyzed, there still is little knowledge on how to improve the HEIs-region relations. The article discusses the role of HEIs, which—being initially perceived as mere location factor—evolved to an active actor in the regional innovation and governance system. The article furthermore offers recommendations for policy makers and practitioners on how to use the knowledge gained for the further development of the HEI-region relations but also how to deal with knowledge gaps and context-specific research results.

Globally, indigenous knowledge (IK) has been shown to be a critical factor in economic growth and sustainable development and is as important as scientific knowledge. However, when it comes to the African narrative, IK research still seems to fall short, even with the great recognition and interest it is attracting. IK has always been underprivileged and marginalized, treated as an unsubstantiated type of knowledge that cannot provide any scientific solutions. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to provide an insight into the importance of IK research from a comparative African perspective from 1990 to 2020. The paper used a combination of bibliometric analysis and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) protocol to provide a comprehensive view of IK research. The VOSviewer software was used to provide a visualization of the bibliometric analysis through network maps. The findings suggest that while IK is a globally recognized concept, the African narrative is missing and not told by Africans. Most researched studies on IK in Africa are on ethnobotany, customs, traditions, agroforestry, and agriculture. Moreover, most of the IK research is from Southern Africa. There is a need for the integration of IK and scientific knowledge to develop well-informed approaches, methodologies, and frameworks that cater to indigenous communities and resilient ecological development. The research outcomes provide valuable insights for future research trends; they further highlight opportunities for building research partnerships for strengthening policy generation and implementation.

The paper sheds light on the path-dependent development of the Viennese entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE). By taking into account temporal dynamics from the 1990s onwards as well as region-specificities we are able to demonstrate the evolution of the EE is not a linear process, but rather the various pillars of the EE may develop in distinct directions and find themselves in discrete development stages. Our in-depth analysis supports the understanding of how various pillars of the EE – especially the regulatory and finance/funding pillar – interrelate. Furthermore, the detected cause–effect interlinkages are not balanced, but are rather shaped by power-constellations and temporal imprinting as well as other regional specificities, which influence the overall success of the EE.

The potential of universities to become ‘change agents’ for sustainability has increasingly been highlighted in the literature. Some largely open questions are how universities get involved in regional sustainability transitions and how that affects their role in these processes. This paper argues that universities need to develop a boundary-spanning capacity, which enables them to transcend disciplinary as well as sectoral boundaries in order to adopt a developmental role in regional sustainability transitions. It is investigated how universities develop this capacity within a particular regional context, using the method of a transition topology. Comparing how the relationships of universities with their surrounding regions developed in Augsburg (Germany) and Linz (Austria), the paper shows why these processes are place-specific. A university’s boundary-spanning capacity develops over time and differs according to the actors involved. The primarily bottom-up driven process in Augsburg was thematically quite broad and involved diverse actors. In Linz, the top-down initiated process was fragmented and more narrowly focused. Individual value-driven actors that made use of their personal networks played an important role in both regions.