Universities are increasingly expected to contribute not only to teaching and research, but also to public-sector innovation, regional development, and digitally enabled governance. This article examines how higher education institutions organize that contribution by comparing two university-based transfer architectures: Smart-EDU Hub @ SNSPA in Bucharest and the distributed transfer portfolio of RheinMain University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSRM). Using a qualitative comparative case-study design based on the document analysis of internal strategy and regulatory documents, institutional webpages, and European policy frameworks, the study analyzes the mission framing, organizational form, program architecture, trust infra-structure, and scaling logic. The documentary analysis indicates that Smart-EDU Hub is formally presented and institutionally organized as a centralized, branded, mission-led platform that bundles conferences, courses, projects, visiting scholars, and publication channels under a recognizable public-facing identity. HSRM, by contrast, is documented as a distributed transfer portfolio linking transfer strategy, dialogue formats, digitally supported teaching, administrative digitalization, continuing education, and AI support services. The comparison should therefore be read as an analysis of formal and publicly documented transfer architectures, not as an evaluation of actual institutional performance, stakeholder experience, or societal impact. The article contributes to Administrative Sciences by conceptualizing university transfer for smart governance as a public-management and governance-design problem. It develops an analytical hybrid transfer-architecture framework in which a visible hub is combined with distributed specialist nodes, shared quality assurance, and explicit safeguards for ethics, cybersecurity, and trustworthy AI.
Higher education is being required to contribute more directly to national development, yet most instruments through which the state currently measures university performance are originally designed for other purposes. Not many are designed to steer the intermediate space between minimum compliance and frontier research performance, where most universities in an absorption-stage economy compete. This paper reframes the problem as one of governance rather than measurement, and develops a governance theory of policy-instrument portfolios organised around distinct governance objects. Drawing on that theory, the Vietnamese Multidimensional Impact Assessment Framework (V-MIAF) is derived as a steering instrument for the currently under-occupied governance space. Five domains are specified, namely workforce skill fit, economic value of knowledge, venture sustainability, collaborative integration, and institutional integrity, with integrity operating as a substrate that conditions the legitimacy of contribution generated elsewhere. Documentary analysis of 2024 institutional reporting from four Vietnamese universities illustrates the analytical visibility the account creates, and a two-gate design couples V-MIAF to Circular 20/2026 and the Autonomy Decree. The contribution is a governance-theoretic account of university impact assessment, an integrity-substrate design, and a portable conceptual logic.
Hang Tran, Hong T. M. Bui· Vietnam Journal of Education· 0 citations
The GKFI serves as a blueprint for the sustainable provision of digital common goods in the humanities and cultural studies, and functions not as a replacement for project-based innovation, but as a complementary anchor of stability.
Stefan Buddenbohm, Aline Deicke, Daniel Kurzawe et al.· BIBLIOTHEK Forschung und Pra...· 0 citations
Digital transformation has become a central driver of public administration modernization, as governments increasingly rely on digital technologies to improve public service delivery, administrative efficiency, transparency, and citizen-oriented governance. However, the rapid expansion of digital government research has generated a fragmented literature, dispersed across concepts such as e-government, digital transformation, public services, governance, innovation, and emerging technologies. This fragmentation limits the understanding of how the field is thematically structured and how scientific collaboration is organized across countries and institutions. Therefore, this paper maps the intellectual structure of digital government literature and identifies the dominant themes, emerging research directions, and collaboration patterns within this field. A bibliometric science-mapping analysis was conducted on 1,877 documents indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection, retrieved using the topic search terms "digital transformation" and "public services". The analysis was performed with VOSviewer and focused on keyword co-occurrence, country coauthorship, and organizational co-authorship networks. The findings show that digital transformation serves as the conceptual hub of the field, connecting traditional e-government research with newer themes in innovation, governance, artificial intelligence, big data, trust, adoption, performance, and post-pandemic public service resilience. The countrylevel network reveals broad but uneven international collaboration, while the organizational network remains more fragmented. The study contributes by integrating thematic and collaboration-based perspectives, showing that digital government research is expanding, interdisciplinary, and globally visible, but still institutionally fragmented and unevenly connected. These findings indicate the need for stronger institutional partnerships, interdisciplinary integration, and more coherent research networks in future digital government studies
Andrei Trip, Florina Stanciu, O. Lobonţ· Development Through Research...· 0 citations
Universities are increasingly expected to translate research into economic and social value, yet the policy designs through which they govern technology transfer vary across higher education systems. This study compares 695 currently operative institutional documents on university technology transfer from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and China. Using text mining, rule-based coding, and manual content analysis, it examines five governance dimensions: transfer modalities, funding mechanisms, ownership and IP governance, organizational arrangements, and revenue distribution. The findings show convergence in the centrality of IP protection and researcher incentives, but also complicate simple state-versus-market typologies. U.S. universities combine market coordination with public accountability and professionalized intermediation; U.K. universities link commercialization to impact-oriented accountability infrastructures; Australia relies on procedural, partnership-based, TTO-centered coordination; and China combines state steering with high inventor rewards and selective market-style mechanisms. Across systems, revenue distribution is not the dominant governance signal; policy attention concentrates more strongly on IP governance, transfer pathways, and organizational coordination. The study offers a configurational account of technology transfer governance, showing how universities adapt to innovation pressures through nationally differentiated combinations of state, market, and academic logics.
Chunshun Yan, Tianyi Sun, Mengting Qian· Research in Higher Education· 0 citations
It is argued that Africa’s effective participation in the 4IR depends not only on adopting technology but also on strong governance, sound regulatory frameworks, strategic policy implementation, cross-sector collaboration, targeted investment, and skills development.
Stella Gichuhi-Karau· Proceedings of the 1st Afric...· 0 citations
Against the global imperative to advance higher education for sustainable development and institutional transformation in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), coherent governance architectures have been recognized as a foundational prerequisite for enabling universities to embed sustainability into values into core operations, teaching, research, and community engagement. Drawing on socio-technical systems theory and complex adaptive systems thinking, this study analyzes 167 central-level policy documents (2015–2023) related to China’s Higher Education “Delegation, Regulation, and Service” reform to examine how governance intentions are translated into organizational control mechanisms. A dual-dimensional analytical framework is developed that conceptualizes policy objectives as system goals and policy instruments as control levers, combining content analysis with fuzzy systems methodology to quantify system coupling. The findings reveal distinct emergent patterns: governance objectives exhibit structural differentiation with functional complementarity, whereas the synergy of control levers is shaped by their functional roles and organizational adaptability. More importantly, a selective pattern of structural–functional decoupling is identified. Coupling between Improving Quality and its supporting levers declines substantially over the study period, while coupling involving Stimulating Vitality exhibits marked volatility and an overall decline. By contrast, coupling associated with Breaking Down Institutional Barriers and Improving the Modern University System remains consistently high. These differentiated patterns suggest that governance misalignment is concentrated in quality- and vitality-related objectives rather than occurring uniformly across the governance system. The study provides a diagnostic framework for assessing governance coherence as a prerequisite for organizational capacity-building, contributing to both sustainability governance research and the design of more coherent institutional governance systems.