This paper looks at a little-explored role that universities can play: that of representing a channel for brain gain, enabling regions to attract bright students who may decide to stay after they have graduated. In this way, universities can be a source of selective migration processes and possibly of diverging development paths, by augmenting the capability of economically dynamic regions to attract bright people from the lagging regions. In this paper, we argue that student mobility behaviour is a function not only of the quality of universities, but also of local labour market conditions in the destination locations. The paper relies on a gravity model, and shows that graduate migrations respond to several determinants, among which graduate job vacancies (that is, the dynamism of the local labour market) appear to be essential.

The growing interest in addressing societal challenges is changing research and innovation policy dynamics. However, a challenge-oriented approach requires specific public sector capacities to coordinate and provide directionality, while having an innovation ecosystem with sufficient scientific and technological capabilities to address the grand societal challenges effectively. From this perspective, a challenge-oriented policy is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and the literature has only recently started investigating the territorial differences. The current paper proposes a composite index to assess REgional Societal Challenges-Oriented REadiness (RE-SCORE). An exploratory experimental application is conducted to examine and compare Italian regions facing four selected societal challenges (SCs): bioeconomy, climate change, health and inclusive, innovative and reflective societies. The findings show that the Italian regional readiness to address SCs is highly heterogeneous, going beyond the ‘traditional’ North-South divide. The index allows us to benchmark regional capacities for comparative analysis and to identify possible interregional synergies around specific SCs. This approach could be used in other European countries and at the European level to assess the regional readiness to tackle SCs.