The Rise of the University's Third Mission

The last decades have seen a fundamental upheaval in the organisation of modern life, and the university as an institution has been as widely affected by these changes as business, governments, and civil society groups. Higher education has been confronted with increasing marketisation of the State and aggressive re-regulation of the public sector. Internationalisation has created new potential markets for students, alongside increasing access to research collaborators, but it opened universities up to competition with and comparison against institutions in other countries. The growing importance of knowledge production and innovation for economic life has created new potential roles for universities and challenged the traditional societal privileges and monopolies which they have long enjoyed. But these changes have come at the same time as an evolution in the process of change: a growing role for the State in creating and regulating markets in public services has come with a greater role for the State in guiding this reform process.