One of the most interesting topics in economic geography is “lock-in”:  that is, the tendency of a region to double-down on a particular set of industries/technologies.   Generally, the term is used in a negative fashion: that is, the doubling-down is done unwisely, when said industries and technologies are becoming uncompetitive and/or heading for obsolescence.  It’s easy enough to understand why regions do this: if they have specialized in a particular area, it’s because at one point they had a big comparative advantage and it delivered prosperity.  Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, and it’s hard to come to terms with the idea that what made a region great isn’t what is going to maintain a region in the future.

An interesting question here is: what is the role of universities in “lock-in”?  Do they help regions avoid it?  Or do they in fact contribute to lock-in?

Let’s start by telling a tale of two universities, both located in a regional economy which was over-concentrated in a single industry.  First up, the University of Akron, located in a city which in the early 1900s was one of the world’s greatest tech clusters thanks to its rubber and tire industries.  The university (then private – it became public during the 1960s) set up engineering programs specifically to service the rubber industry.  It became famous as a rubber-focused university. It maintained this close connection to the rubber industry even as it started to go downhill in the 60s and 70s, as American manufacturers failed to deal with the challenge of European-made radial tires.  In fact, it even created a College of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering in 1988, just a year or two before Goodyear, the last manufacturer to continue production in the city, shifted production out of the region.

The University of Akron’s decision to go big in polymer research paid some dividends.  A small research cluster of a few hundred companies did grow up around the institution, and these employ a few thousand people.  But that has not really reversed the region’s fortunes: these new jobs don’t outweigh the 35,000 or so manufacturing jobs that left between 1970 and 1990, and so the city has continued to see its population decline.

Compare this to what happened in another rubber town: Kitchener-Waterloo.  When the University of Waterloo came into being as an engineering-focused institution with some crazy idea about integrating work and learning into something called “co-op”, it did so largely in support of local tire-making firms.  But during in the 60s and 70s, the university began focusing on some wild new industry – which barely registered as a major employer at the time – which eventually came to be known as Information Technology.   The rubber industry left KW in the same way it left Akron.  The difference is that because of decades of work by the University of Waterloo, there was an entirely new industry there to replace it, one which to this day continues to make the entire region flourish.

Obviously, every institution wants to claim it is Waterloo, not Akron.  They all want to be able to claim that they are “inventing the future”, that they are so close to the cutting edge of science/technology /whatever, that they are communities’ best bet of getting a foothold in new industries and thus avoiding lock-in.  And if they make this argument persuasively enough, perhaps someone will give them more money to stay even closer to the cutting edge and thus benefit their regions.

That’s a fine answer, but it’s not clear how true it is.  Consider: if there is one thing universities and colleges love to say they are doing, it is “working with local/regional business”.  Governments tell them to do this all the time, so it makes good sense for them to trumpet this aspect of their activities.  They will want to talk to businesses about partnerships, about curriculum, about donations – all areas where there can be fruitful interaction between institutions and employers.

But who is “business” in this case?  Is it new businesses, upstarts coming out of nowhere in new fields of endeavour?  Or is it existing businesses, pillars of the community, which tend to be in well-established industries?  This is an underexplored question, but it seems to me that for a bunch of wholly understandable reasons there’s almost certainly a very strong bias towards the latter.   If you’re a Dean, pressed to come up with a name for an advisory committee, it’s a heck of a lot easier to think of “established” names than it is to think of the up-and-comers, not least of all because the latter are often nose-to-the-grind entrepreneurs too busy running their businesses to participate in regional public life at a level that would bring them to anyone’s attention (not to mention that more established companies will have more money to donate, make more hires of graduates, etc., and thus be more prominent on the institution’s committees).

And the problem may not even be down to the institution.  Think about the external pressure institutions can come under to help declining industries. A local industry will think it deserves assistance from the local university, particularly if it has been a good partner over the years. Local politicians will almost certainly push universities to provide existinglocal industry with assistance, because extant industry has workers and political donors, and future industries don’t (yet).  Given all these pressures, I suspect that it is quite hard for universities, in practice, to avoid being part of the lock-in problem.

One shouldn’t paint all universities as being problematic: obviously, Waterloo shows that contributing to lock-in is avoidable.  What is true, however, is that there is a need for institutions to be mindful of the danger of economic lock-in and ensure that they are not contributing to it.  The challenge of ensuring that the act of “working with business” is serving the economy of tomorrow rather than the economy of yesterday should get more policy attention than it does not just from institutions, but from all levels of government.  If you believe universities drive prosperity, there are few more pressing issues than how to help and partner with future industries as well as existing ones.