By Matt Ziembla, James Evans, Mabel Sánchez-Barrioluengo and Elvira Uyarra

Universities are increasingly being asked to help places tackle challenges such as net zero, inequality and public health. But that raises some difficult questions. Who decides which challenges matter? Whose knowledge counts? And what role should universities play in shaping the answers? 

These questions are at the heart of our new paper in Contemporary Social Science, developed through the Horizon Europe CATALYSE project. We argue that place-based missions do not necessarily require universities to invent entirely new activities. Rather, they require universities to connect what they already do more deliberately to transformative regional goals. 

Why place matters 

Mission-oriented innovation policy seeks to mobilise innovation around ambitious societal goals. But missions do not land on a blank canvas. Regions differ in their economies, institutions, capabilities and social needs. A challenge such as net zero will look very different in a former industrial region than in a rural area or a major city. 

Place therefore changes not only how missions are delivered, but also how problems and priorities are defined. Questions of legitimacy quickly arise: who decides what transformation is needed locally, whose voices are included, and how can organisations with different priorities remain aligned over time? 

We see place-based missions as processes through which broad societal challenges are translated into locally meaningful priorities, governance arrangements and pathways for implementation. This brings universities into focus because they combine knowledge, convening power, physical and organisational resources, and often a long-term commitment to place. 

Six roles for universities in place-based missions 

Our paper identifies six roles through which universities can contribute to place-based missions. These roles are not entirely new, nor does every university need to perform all six. What changes under a mission-oriented approach is their purpose and how they fit together. Existing activities become mission-relevant when they contribute deliberately to direction-setting, collective action, experimentation and capability development. 

Universities can act as knowledge brokers, bringing together scientific, policy, practitioner and community knowledge to help define locally meaningful problems and possible solutions. Their wider networks also allow them to connect knowledge developed elsewhere with local experience, rather than assuming that solutions can simply be transferred from one place to another.

Universities are not only knowledge organisations. They are often major employers, purchasers, investors and landowners, giving them a direct stake in regional change. As regional anchors, they can use these resources to strengthen resilience, support emerging activities and influence how the benefits and costs of transformation are distributed. 

Place-based missions depend on organisations that have different interests, incentives and time horizons working together. Universities can act as neutral conveners by creating relatively neutral spaces in which governments, businesses, communities and other actors negotiate priorities, build trust and sustain collective action. This role also brings responsibilities, because universities have interests of their own and cannot simply assume neutrality.

Missions unfold under uncertainty, so monitoring, evaluation and learning are central to delivery. Universities are well placed to act as evidence providers, generating evidence on regional conditions and mission progress, assessing intended and unintended effects, and supporting adaptation as circumstances change. Their contribution is therefore not only to establish what works, but to enable collective learning over time. 

Universities can provide spaces in which new technological and social solutions are developed and tested before wider deployment. Campuses, living labs and research infrastructures can function as innovation testbeds, bringing researchers, public agencies, firms and communities together around experimentation, while helping identify risks, practical constraints and possibilities for scaling.Place-based missions also depend on whether regional actors have the skills and capabilities to design and deliver them. Through teaching, training, knowledge exchange and specialised expertise, universities can function as capacity builders, strengthening the capacity of firms, public organisations and communities to participate in mission processes and sustain them over time.

What does this look like in Greater Manchester? 

The six roles can already be seen in activities across Greater Manchester’s innovation ecosystem. They are not performed by individual universities in isolation. Through the Greater Manchester Civic University Agreement, the region’s five universities work together around shared regional priorities. 

Across the city-region, different institutions bring complementary capabilities: 

• The University of Manchester Urban Living Lab connects sustainability challenges with academics and students. 

• Policy@Manchester and the Greater Manchester Policy Hub create spaces for exchange between researchers and policymakers. 

• The Tyndall Centre contributes evidence on local carbon budgets. 

• The University of Salford’s Energy House provides a testing environment for low-carbon housing technologies. 

• Manchester Metropolitan University’s PrintCity combines advanced manufacturing facilities with training and business support. 

These are illustrations of the different roles, rather than evidence that each initiative constitutes a place-based mission. The more interesting question is how these distributed capabilities can be combined and connected more deliberately to shared transformative objectives.

The harder part: changing universities themselves 

The most difficult questions arise when universities try to deepen this engagement. Mission-oriented roles cannot simply be added to existing structures without confronting tensions inside universities and in the systems around them. 

First, mission engagement is deeply political. Helping to decide which regional transformations should be pursued, and for whose benefit, means engaging with questions of power and distribution. Universities need to avoid privileging academic knowledge over local experience or using their influence to advance their own institutional interests. 

Second, deeper engagement may require changes to incentives and career structures. Sustained regional work often depends on people who span academic, policy and professional boundaries, yet these activities are not always well recognised in conventional academic reward systems. Universities may need to develop and value roles such as boundary spanners, civic entrepreneurs and mission coordinators. 

Third, universities may need to use their own resources more strategically. Procurement, investment, teaching and entrepreneurship support are not peripheral to mission engagement: they can shape local demand, capabilities and opportunities. Treating them strategically means embedding regional transformation more deeply in the institution rather than confining it to outreach activity. 

Finally, universities cannot make this transition alone. National funding and higher-education systems often reward competition, international research excellence and short-term projects rather than sustained regional collaboration. Deeper mission engagement therefore requires changes not only within universities, but also in the policy and funding environments surrounding them.

From civic engagement to mission engagement 

Our argument is not that every civic activity should now be relabelled as a ‘mission’. Rather, place-based missions offer a way of thinking more systematically about how universities contribute to transformative regional change. The key is not whether a university can point to individual civic initiatives, but whether its knowledge, resources and capabilities are connected to direction-setting, collective action and implementation around shared regional goals. 

Moving from civic engagement to mission engagement therefore means asking a more demanding question: not simply how universities engage with their places, but how they can help those places decide where they want to go, mobilise the actors and resources needed to get there, and build the capacity for sustained transformation.

Resources 

Read the paper: “From civic to mission engagement: the roles of universities in place-based missions”, by Matt Ziembla, James Evans, Mabel Sánchez-Barrioluengo and Elvira Uyarra, published in Contemporary Social Science. 

Read the accompanying report: “The role of knowledge institutions in place-based missions”, by Matt Ziembla, James Evans, Mabel Sánchez-Barrioluengo and Elvira Uyarra. The report develops the paper’s argument in greater detail.

Related