5. Unleashing the potential of place-responsive higher education institutions and systems in Québec
Québec has proven to be an ideal laboratory for the “geography of higher education” that assesses the way in which HEIs can ignite entrepreneurship and innovation in their own communities, while producing internationally relevant research. This final section presents and illustrates selected policy recommendations that could improve “place-responsiveness” in Québec’s higher education system and institutions.
Québec is mobilised to become an international innovative and entrepreneurial leader. Policy reforms spur higher education institutions (HEIs) to act entrepreneurially and collaborate with external stakeholders, including businesses of all sizes and maturity. New entities have been created to facilitate the connection between HEIs and Québec’s multidimensional strategy for innovation, which features an explicit spatial dimension.
The province is experiencing growth after the COVID-19 pandemic but is challenged by the high level of international uncertainty. The present review of the “geography of higher education” offers an international perspective to advance innovation and entrepreneurship in Québec, taking stock of the current initiatives and addressing remaining challenges, including those related to resilience, sustainability and inclusion.Mirroring the overall structure of the report, this succinct final chapter offers recommendations in relationship with entrepreneurship education; entrepreneurship ecosystems; and HEIs as place-responsive policy partners with the objective of accelerating the momentum achieved so far.
As for entrepreneurship education, Québec could consider mainstreaming and deepening formal entrepreneurship education in the HE system and institutions, to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset in more individuals and to encourage engagement in entrepreneurial activities. Evidence collected through the HEI Leaders Survey (see Annex B) shows that entrepreneurship education affects individuals’ mindset, desirable in the context of the innovation strategy. Developing HEIs’ impact on entrepreneurial activities in Québec will require a series of policy innovations. For example, it will be important to recognise the status of entrepreneur for students and researchers, to facilitate their respective careers.
Québec should promote collaboration among entrepreneurial HEIs, incubators, accelerators and entrepreneurial centres, to increase scale, increase the value-added and promote transdisciplinary platforms, mixing experiences and cultures. These co-ordinated platforms would operate like “colliders”, unleashing new energy and potential. This is particularly relevant in Montréal, which could strengthen its role as a primary international entrepreneurial hub, solving economic and societal problems at the global scale through bolder and more engaged collaborations.
Entrepreneurial HEIs will play a pivotal role in their regional and local ecosystems. The SQRI 2 is already anchoring HEIs to innovation, including in rural areas, a remarkable initiative that may inspire other OECD countries and regions. However, the Québec system will need to create new incentives and career opportunities for academic communities to collaborate with external stakeholders in order to support entrepreneurial activities sustainably, beyond the funding the strategy provides. Without these incentives, co-production and co-specialisation will remain a low priority for faculty and staff in HEIs. Enhanced co-operation between the Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Energy (MEIE) and the Ministry of Higher Education (MES) and other key players such as the funding agencies will be important from this perspective.
Québec can leverage the diversity of its HEIs to promote entrepreneurship ecosystems and broaden the scope of its innovation strategy. The provincial approach should find an equilibrium between the current focus on deep-tech start-ups and artificial intelligence. Innovation should be promoted in all sectors and supply chains, including in the traditional ones characteristic of the provincial economy, especially in non-metropolitan and rural regions. Providing more individuals with transversal skills may increase their productivity and help buffer the current pressure on the provincial labour market. Entities such as the Cégeps and CCTTs could be mobilised to provide entrepreneurial skills – besides technical support – to firms and entrepreneurs belonging to sectors and related supply chains.
As in the case of entrepreneurship education, the success of policies promoting entrepreneurial ecosystems will depend on the capacity to create complementarities: a coherent package of policy reforms that link innovation with higher education, regional and rural development, health and other relevant policy sectors. Synergies can also be generated with policies promoting sustainability and inclusion.
Entrepreneurship education activities in Québec HEIs are thriving, but they often appear to be fragmented across disciplines and places. This affects its effectiveness and scale. Provincial authorities could consider the creation of common spaces to improve the scale of activities promoting entrepreneurship and innovation. While preserving their autonomy, incubators and accelerators could formally share good practices and generate networks of collaboration. To promote transdisciplinary activities, including within HEIs, Québec could consider international examples such as Aalto University in Finland, which has aimed to create a collaboration hub in the university, cutting across different disciplines to maximise the impact of entrepreneurship pedagogies and practices (Box 5.1).
Entrepreneurship is a major part of Aalto University’s strategy. The strategy also includes the ecosystem dimension of entrepreneurship: The aim is to “transform our campus into a unique collaboration hub”. To this end, the university seeks to enlarge the central campus at Otaniemi to create a “vibrant centre” and “structure the campus to support thematic, multidisciplinary clusters and open innovation”. It intends to establish shared spaces with integrated digital solutions for new ways of working. In experimental spaces, researchers will work together with experts and users to co-create solutions, in particular for sustainable development.
Aalto University defined a broad set of performance indicators to measure the fulfilment of its strategy. On campus, these indicators include results of user and partner surveys, spaces shared with academic units in different fields, and external partners. “Enabling indicators” include energy efficiency and CO2 emissions, results from employee satisfaction surveys, quality and cost efficiency of services as well as diversity of the funding base. The performance indicators measure the quality of publications, education and creative products and the value of businesses created, as well as external partnerships and employment of graduates. There are also particular indicators for multidisciplinarity: i) participation in artistic, innovative and entrepreneurial activities, ii) the share of multidisciplinary studies in degrees taken, and iii) the share of multidisciplinary projects.
Source: (Aalto University, 2018[1]; Technopolis, 2018[2])
Further incentives are needed to increase the number of students who engage in entrepreneurial education. Formal recognition and added advantages for students who pursue entrepreneurial activities can spur their interest in entrepreneurial education and can allow them to reconcile their curricular programmes with objectives in entrepreneurship, such as business creation. At the moment, students may face a trade-off between engaging with entrepreneurship and completing their curricular activities. For instance, Québec’s HEIs could formally recognise the status of the “entrepreneurial student”. Several international good practices could inspire policy makers in Québec. France’s PEPITE Programme offers an example of how to implement this (Box 5.3).
An ambitious plan in favour of student entrepreneurship called the PEPITE plan (student centres for innovation, transfer and entrepreneurship) was launched on 22 October 2013 by the Minister of Higher Education and Research. It followed the Beylat-Tambourin report of April 2013 (on innovation, a major challenge for France) which recommended, after observing that the creation of student entrepreneurship centres (PEE) had not generated any real dynamic, to “set up a large-scale programme for learning about entrepreneurship in higher education”.
The plan includes four main measures:
1. the creation of student centres for innovation, transfer and entrepreneurship (PEPITE) throughout the territory, including overseas, on the basis of a call for projects;
2. the creation of a national student-entrepreneur status (SNEE) for students or young graduates with business creation projects. The “student-entrepreneur” (EE) establishment diploma (D2E), framed nationally by a charter, completes the system;
3. the dissemination of a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation through training modules integrated into the courses, with the aim of raising general awareness among all students;
4. the creation of the PEPITE prize, a support system for business creation through financial aid.
Source: (Pépite France, n.d.[3])
Unleashing the potential of entrepreneurship in Montréal
Montréal’s HEIs deserve specific attention, as they operate in the central entrepreneurship and innovation hub in Québec. Different policies and activities of local HEIs have helped generate a dense entrepreneurial ecosystem, which, however, appears to be somewhat fragmented. Increasing the connectivity and collaboration among the different existing entities and networks may positively affect scale and visibility of the main innovation hub in Québec, as well as the capacity to generate transdisciplinary platforms connecting different domains, including STEM and humanities.
To achieve this result, a shared services entrepreneurial “collider” between existing actors in Montréal would enhance co-ordination by allowing different disciplines and cultures to meet and cross-fertilize. Joining forces would generate scale within the Montréal ecosystem, mobilising more resources and individuals promoting entrepreneurship and innovation. Initiatives such as Millénnium Québecor, which aims to co-ordinate entrepreneurship activities within Campus Montréal, are a step in the right direction to make entrepreneurship a central force within Montréal's HEIs. Inspiration can also be drawn from international good practices, such as the Campus Paris-Saclay in France (Box 5.3).
The Paris-Saclay campus was created to provide France with a world-class cluster for academic research and leading international industrial players. Bringing together 18 establishments (now 17, after the merger of Centrale-Supélec), i.e. approximately 10 000 researchers and 60 000 students, the University of Paris-Saclay project aims to unite these institutions under the same banner to offer visibility and international appeal similar to major international universities’.
The center of the Paris-Saclay campus includes two zones, the Moulon and the Palaiseau district:
The Moulon district, with the Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission (CEA) as its centre of gravity, is to bring together the Centrale-Supélec and ENS schools. The HEC business school is located nearby, in Jouy-en-Josas.
The Palaiseau district groups the École nationale de supérieure de techniques avancées (ENSTA), ENSAE, Institut d’Optique Graduate School and Telecom Paris Tech. LIST, the CEA’s technological excellence laboratory, is also located there, with plans to double its area (currently 28 000 square metres) and to become an international digital centre of excellence (the DIGITEC project).
The perimeter of EPA-Paris Saclay includes five major industrial clusters (within the Public Administrative Establishment, the origin of these maps), including: information and communications technology (ICT), with 37 000 employees in 400 establishments; aeronautics, with 30 000 employees in 60 establishments; mobility, with 27 000 employees in 130 establishments; energy, with 17 000 employees in 31 establishments; health care, with 14 000 employees in 130 establishments.
This concentration of private research players offers an opportunity to develop an open ecosystem of innovation: visible, attractive and efficient on the international level.
Source: (Université Paris-Saclay, n.d.[4])
Cégeps and CCTTs are well-connected to firms and individuals located in their surrounding territories. However, interviews revealed that Cégeps may face challenges updating their educational programmes to reflect the skills needed by firms in their ecosystems. Moreover, CCTTs are organised reflecting the sectoral specialisations of their localities, which may reduce the scope of their co-operation activities. Based on these, Québec could consider facilitating the accreditation process for Cégeps that interested in setting up new (or updated) study programmes and broadening the scope of activities of CCTTs, which could provide entrepreneurship education and innovation services for sectors and related supply chains. By innovating their offer of intermediation services, CCTTs could function as “research and technology organisations” (RTOs) and play a pivotal role facilitating innovation and innovation diffusion in their own communities. International good practices, such as the RISE in Sweden, can also serve as examples (Box 5.4).
From the 1960s to the 1990s, the institute sector in Sweden grew from a handful of research institutes to just over 30 institutes, rather small and closely linked to various industrial and materials sectors. From the mid-1980s onwards, public authorities took action to strengthen the entire sector, which was becoming increasingly weak as the academic sector’s research grew.
Actions ranged from reorganisation (the “four-leaf clover” of institutes in related sectors and/or with complementary technologies in four groups) to gathering State ownership in these institutes under a single umbrella (RISE). Since then, RISE (now about 3 000 employees) has operated as a single multisite institute, organised into five divisions and six business and innovation areas, without reference to the original founding members. While the staff is allocated to the five divisions, the six business and innovation areas make it possible to combine expertise and work across all divisions and operations, to be able to respond to long-term and complex challenges through interdisciplinary innovation. RISE, for instance, is the result of the merger of a number of the biggest Swedish research and technology organisations (RTOs) into a single institutional group, which started in 2016.
In addition to five divisions and six business and innovation areas, RISE also has 16 group-wide research areas. Initiatives linked to these areas are often supported by the strategic competence funds provided by the Swedish government to support RISE’s national mission. RISE has also identified reinforcement areas in which knowledge development responds to changing societal challenges and needs. Two of the reinforcement areas, applied AI and Cyber security, became RISE centres in 2021. The centres will ensure additional long-term focus and facilitate the acceleration of applied research to strengthen Swedish competitiveness within the field.
Source: (Larrue and Strauka, 2022[5])
In addition, offering recognition of collaboration activities conducted by researchers and professors within CCTTs and Cégeps may encourage them to connect to actors in their local communities. The HEI Leaders Survey shows that while regulatory frameworks propose incentives for professors and researchers to conduct collaboration activities, discrepancies may arise at the institutional level, when these measures are introduced. International efforts can serve as relevant good practices (Box 5.5).
In the Netherlands, the term “valorisation” is used to refer to knowledge exchange activities. In 2010, a comprehensive four-dimensional framework was proposed to measure “valorisation performance”, combining quantitative and qualitative indicators. The framework and the indicators can be applicable in a wide variety of settings, including research universities and the University of Applied Sciences (UAS), on several levels and for a variety of evaluation goals. The new approach emphasises a process-oriented measurement, moving away from a focus on quantitative outcome-based indicators. In 2012, when all Dutch HEIs were preparing individual performance agreements with the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science for the first time, the review committee invited the HEIs to make use of indicators to illustrate their ambitions for commercialisation of research. Some HEIs responded to this request and agreed to include a number of indicators in their performance agreement as well as in the (mandatory) annual reports they publish each year to report on their overall activity. However, so far, no commonly defined set of indicators used by every HEI has been established, which makes it difficult to compare results and monitor progress nationally.
Source: (OECD/European Union, 2018[6]; OECD/EC, 2019[7])
The Innovation Zones (zones d’innovation, or IZs) show that the SQRI 2 promotes a spatial approach to innovation and entrepreneurship. IZs also prove the efforts of the innovation strategy to promote innovation in non-metropolitan and rural areas, which represents a good practice that deserves international visibility. IZs are implemented by involving different local stakeholders, including local governments, SMEs, private firms, entrepreneurs and of course HEIs, which play a central role in the policy. Québec’s Ministère de l'Enseignement Supérieur (Ministry of Higher Education, or MES) supports the training and education pillar of the zones in projects intended to maximise research, investment and skills.
Involving the MES in entrepreneurship and innovation policies can create an opportunity to pilot interventions and reforms in Innovation Zones. The MES could use IZs as test beds to introduce incentives and career opportunities for academics and students, for example by promoting the status of “student entrepreneur” discussed above. This could unlock the potential of the start-up movement and the entrepreneurial mindset in these zones. Once tested in IZs, regulatory reforms could be extended to the rest of the province.
The Innovation Zones propose a holistic idea of innovation, which explicitly connects with the need for improved social and urban frameworks. These components are relevant to the development of the whole community and should not be overlooked when introducing IZs. Going forward, IZs could be more explicit in referring to social and urban development, by referring to concepts such as “urban regeneration” and developing local relationships to emphasise these aspects and promote policy complementarities and synergies. IZs could be explicitly linked to regional development policies and initiatives and offer additional momentum to local initiatives, such as the Société de Promotion Économique de Rimouski (SOPER) in Rimouski, which has developed a range of activities supporting innovation and entrepreneurship, including NOVARIUM (see Chapter 4).
To achieve these results, IZs could be supported by specific organisations involving local actors and leaders. The aim would be to link entrepreneurship and innovation with other policy agendas and positively affect welfare and well-being in the host localities. Although rare, there are some international initiatives that operate on the frontier of innovation, entrepreneurship, social and regional development. For instance, the Academy of Smart Specialisation is a good practice example of mobilising all players in the ecosystem that contribute to the region’s smart specialisation strategy (Box 5.6).
Karlstad University (KAU), in the Region Värmland, Sweden, is a good example of an HEI that has created ad hoc institutions and practices to connect with regional stakeholders. KAU, capitalising on its long collaboration with the regional government, has established the Academy for Smart Specialisation. The aim of the academy is to better connect research activities with innovation needs and potential in the region, as identified by Region Värmland’s Smart Specialisation Strategy. The Academy for Smart Specialisation supports multidisciplinary research centres, including a centre of gender studies co-managed by the university and the regional government. These centres support sustainable development of the regional productive sector and, at the same time, improve the capacity of regional authorities to identify transformative innovation opportunities for the regional productive sector.
Source: (OECD / EC, 2021[8])
References
[1] Aalto University (2018), Shaping the Future - Strategy 2016-2020.
[5] Larrue, P. and O. Strauka (2022), “The contribution of RTOs to socio-economic recovery, resilience and transitions”, OECD Science, Technology and Industry Policy Papers, No. 129, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/ae93dc1d-en.
[8] OECD / EC (2021), Supporting Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Higher Education in Sweden (2021) | HEInnovate, https://heinnovate.eu/en/heinnovate-resources/resources/oecd-ec-supporting-entrepreneurship-and-innovation-higher-education (accessed on 30 August 2022).
[7] OECD/EC (2019), Supporting Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Higher Education in Italy.
[6] OECD/European Union (2018), Supporting Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Higher Education in The Netherlands, OECD Skills Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris/European Union, Brussels, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264292048-en.
[3] Pépite France (n.d.), Construire et développer son projet entrepreneurial - Pépite France.
[2] Technopolis (2018), Leadership and governance for an entrepreneurial culture at Aalto University.
[4] Université Paris-Saclay (n.d.), Les campus | Université Paris-Saclay.