Dr. Ridvan Cinar (p), Dr. Nora Geirsdottir Bækkelund

Skill relatedness has become one of the most widely used concepts for explaining regional economic diversification and inter-industry linkages. It has also been embedded at the core of regional innovation policies, such as in smart specialisation strategies. A central tenet in the relatedness perspective is that industries sharing similar capabilities with emerging sectors can support their development, thereby facilitating regional path creation and diversification. Universities has been increasingly recognised as important actors developing the pool of related skills. While existing literature provides evidence that skill relatedness within a region can foster the growth of emerging industries, it has not yet addressed the challenge that arises when multiple emerging sectors simultaneously depend on the capabilities of a single incumbent industry. In this study, we examine the skill relatedness of oil and gas industry and its impact on development of carbon capturing and storage (CCS), hydrogen and offshore wind sector in Norway’s Vestland region. We have conducted semi-structured interviews with key regional actors including energy firms, universities, industrial clusters and local authorities and analysed key documents. The preliminary findings indicate competition among emerging industries for subsea-related skill sets and show that skill relatedness has had heterogeneous impact on their development. Furthermore, the findings show that universities face difficulties in attracting students to degree programs intended to develop subsea-related skills despite emerging job opportunities. These results contribute to ongoing debates on relatedness in economic geography and offer useful insights for the role of universities in regional sustainability transitions.

Dr. José Gómez (p)

The multiple roles higher education institutions play in the emergence, development, and growth of creative clusters have been explored in the regional studies literature. Authors highlight several paths of influence, including skills development, knowledge transfer, infrastructure provision, and networking facilitation (Comunian et al., 2015; Plum, & Hassink, 2014). Most of these studies analyse creative clusters from the perspective of Economic geography, Econometric modelling, and Management Studies while focusing on formal interactions among clearly defined organizations and the impact these may have on competitiveness and innovation on regional levels (Ozalp, 2024;De-Miguel-Molina et al., 2012; Belyaeva et al., 2022). However, these studies partially leave out of focus the informal daily microdynamics of social life connected to the complex sociocultural and historical components of these clusters. This constitutes a gap in the literature that may obscure other types of less formal interactions among educational organizations and creative clusters that could play a crucial role in their sustainment and expansion over time.

To contribute to these missing pieces in the regional studies literature, this study examines the case of Dundee in the United Kingdom, a post-industrial peripheral city in Scotland that has developed a successful and stable cluster for video games within a growing creative industry sector, in which Abertay University is one of its main pillars. The study is part of a wider study of 6 video game clusters across Europe, the GAME-ER project, and it is based on a multisource approach, implemented since 2024 and still ongoing, including 45 qualitative semi-structured interviews, document analysis performed on 181 documents, archival research, and participatory observation.

By focusing on Dundee´s case, this study contributes to the literature by examining how higher education institutions contribute to the emergence and transformations of video games clusters in particular, while also enriching the knowledge concerning universities within creative clusters as a whole. The study identifies several roles, in addition to the ones already mentioned in the literature, through which Universities contribute: becoming social anchors for clusters in times of change and crisis; absorbing the expertise of game developers and translating it into curricular design and teaching; diversifying professional pathways for game developers who are already working in the industry; becoming a mnemonic repository for the whole cluster across time; providing a more balanced critical outlook on the industry for potential graduates; and integrating industry partners into research projects with national and international dimensions.

Dr. Diogo Ribeiro, Prof. Ricardo Biscaia (p)

The spatial distribution of highly skilled labour is a central concern in regional science, as graduate workers tend to concentrate in major metropolitan areas, leaving peripheral regions struggling to attract and retain talent. Understanding what drives graduates’ early‑career mobility is therefore critical for designing effective regional development policies. A particularly important but understudied question concerns the role of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs): does studying in a given region generate a genuine retention effect on graduates’ job locations, independent of labour‑market conditions and individual characteristics? Or do apparent retention patterns merely reflect pre‑existing student profiles?
This study investigates the determinants of intranational graduate migration in Portugal, a country marked by strong regional imbalances and the dominance of Lisbon and Porto in labour opportunities. Using microdata from the Portuguese component of the EUROGRADUATE 2022 survey, which covers graduates from the 2020/21 cohort, we analyse a representative sample of employed graduates one year after degree completion. The dataset provides detailed sociodemographic, educational, and geographic information at NUTS III level, enabling the distinction between ties to the origin region and to the study region — an aspect often missing in previous studies.
We estimate two complementary models that address both the 'whether' and the 'where' of graduate mobility. First, a binary logit model estimates the probability that a graduate remains in their study region. Second, a conditional logit model examines the likelihood of choosing any of the 25 NUTS III regions as the place of work, with mutually exclusive dummies capturing origin, study, and joint ties.
Preliminary findings indicate that individual characteristics such as gender, age, and academic performance have statistically insignificant explanatory power for retention. Instead, retention appears predominantly geographic: region‑specific factors strongly influence whether graduates stay. In the location‑choice model, both origin and study regions exhibit significant positive effects on the probability of working in those areas, even after controlling for regional attractiveness. Origin ties are stronger, but study ties also matter. The joint effect of having both ties in the same region is positive but non‑additive, suggesting substitutability between the mechanisms of attachment.
Overall, the results provide evidence that HEIs generate genuine place‑based retention effects that extend beyond labour‑market quality or individual mobility propensity. This finding, which is to be corroborated through further analysis and robustness checks, could have direct implications for the evaluation of place-based higher education investment as an instrument for regional development.

Dr. Arda Tuncer (p), Prof.Dr. Ferhan Gezici

Annual reports towards the progress of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have shown that sufficient progress is not being achieved yet for most of the goals. Knowledge production is important in all its various context in tracking this progress to identify and solve problems along the way towards the achievement of SDGs. In this regard, the relationship between the scientific knowledge production by universities and SDGs has also begun to attract more attention in the literature. Within this scope, this study aims to examine the specialization and diversification composition as well as regional performance of Turkey's 26 NUTS 2 regions in terms of scientific knowledge production towards SDGs, based on the number of scientific publications and citations. Both publication and citation data for the 2015-2025 period are obtained from the Scopus database, which are classified according to SDGs. These data are gathered at the institutional level which is, then, aggregated to the NUTS 2 level regions. Location quotient, relative diversification and shift-share are used to gain the required insight into the structural composition and performance of the regions. The results highlight the rise of new centers beyond the traditionally leading regions as well as newcomers with positive regional performance. The traditionally leading regions have moderate to high diversity in their SDG publication and citation patterns with specialization in fields which show smaller number of regions with such concentrations.

Dr. Eda Yucesoy (p), Ahmet Salih Odabaş, Prof. Dr. Alim Arlı

Local and central governments, as well as various civil institutions and organizations, prioritize the internationalization of their cities in terms of student numbers within the context of global competition. Factors influencing international student flow are positively related to the quality of higher education, economic factors, and historical ties between countries, while geographical distance and linguistic proximity are discussed as potential hinders of international student mobility. Higher education institutions, particularly whose locations are peripheral significantly differentiate their policies in many ways. In peripheral regions, in non-metropolitan contexts, universities have utilized a localized approach coupled with populist political discourse. The geography of higher education in Türkiye has drastically changed with the spreading of higher education institutions from the center to periphery since 1990s. This dispersion of higher education institutions all over the country generates a vibrant yet obscure landscape. Coupled with attracting international students, this distinctive geography of higher education institutions in Türkiye produces urban relational systems that call for new analyses. Since the last decade, Türkiye has emerged as a strong educational hub, particularly for students from Muslim-majority countries. As universities have been largely endowed by the government’s insistent internationalization policy in higher education, the number of international students in Türkiye has increased by 251 percent in the last decade. This paper aims at exploring this imbalanced spatiality of internationalization of higher education institutions and social characteristics of Turkish cities. Understanding these unique patterns and formulating new perspectives to analyze the complexity of this landscape have become an interesting research topic. A novel database is compiled for the research. The analysis is conducted on a provincial level in order to locate clusters of specializations, densities and agglomerations that describe the distinctive characteristics of the international higher education nodes and corresponding cities. Analyzing and representing placements of international students reveal unique spatial typologies in relation to different provincial structures. The paper adopts a relational mapping perspective, i.e. quantitative inquiry for identifying clusters of higher education institutions and social characteristics of cities. The paper indicates an alternative formation of urban regions and hierarchies in Turkey, based on higher education clusters, social capacities, and international students.