Support of Higher Education to Regional Development:
Building Bridges between Portuguese and Brazilian Universities
Cássio Rolim – UFPR Mauricio Serra – UNICAMP
This paper aims at building a methodology on how the best practices of
Portuguese universities regarding regional development can be a useful tool for small Brazilian universities located in the hinterland. It is important to highlight here that its focus is on the support of universities to regional development from a regional policy viewpoint. The idea of universities working in close connection with the needs of their surrounding communities is not new. In fact, it came about the same time when universities began to spread around the world. At that time, universities were mainly education institutions and it was only in the last century that they increased their research activities. Over the last decades, universities have come under pressure to give a deeper contribution to the development of their communities through the so-called Third Mission, whose activities are, in general, related to technology transfer and innovation, continuing education and social engagement. Since 2000, with the disclosure of the Lisbon Agenda by the European Council, the support of Higher Educations Institutions to regional development has been an important challenge to European universities. The Portuguese universities, like other European universities, have worked on these goals with different outcomes, being some of them, such as the universities of Aveiro, Evora and Minho, highly succeeded in the engagement with their communities. With regard to Brazilian universities, they are not still engaged in a process of supporting the development of their regions. The Brazilian higher education system is very unbalanced. Some world-class universities coexist with small colleges where any type of research is hardly done. This imbalance is spread all over the country, principally in lagging regions. The more a region needs, the more disconnected it is from the knowledge infrastructure for development. This project can be perceived as a bridge between two different contexts that might improve both of them. On the Portuguese side, the review of best practises will filter the experiences and, at the same time, show what is really working. On the Brazilian side, the understanding of the best practices will facilitate the universities’ process of supporting regional development. In addition, it will help the responsible for regional policy to improve their instruments of intervention. The proposed methodology reviews three dimensions regarding implementation policies of the typical third-mission activities developed by those three chosen Portuguese universities. The first dimension is design, which is related to the policy making process and the human and financial resources needed for its implementation. The second one is implementation, which means the process by which the policy is carried out. The third dimension is efficacy, which focuses on how the policy, through a number of indicators, is achieving the intended result. However, the support of higher education to regional development goes beyond third mission and is necessary a fourth dimension, which is named graduate skills. This new dimension is connected with the educational outcomes of the graduates regarding the needs of the regional economy. It is more than academic performance and includes several skills, such as creativity, entrepreneurship, leadership, sociability and so on. All these dimensions must be considered and confirmed by universities and stakeholders, being the next step their systematization and consolidation.