Campus decision makers are increasingly expected to adopt ‘campus innovations’ (affecting real estate and different facilities), not only from the market and demand-led (external campus innovations), but also developed by the university's own scientists (internal campus innovations). The adoption of the latter can be driven and hindered by many unique factors that campus decision makers have not dealt with before. To provide insight into them, qualitative data were collected from 13 out of 14 Dutch research-intensive universities. The results indicate that internal campus innovations are driven by co-creation stimulation, collaborative partnership, transparency and accountability, and local development contribution. Their adoption, however, may be obstructed by barriers embedded in the interaction between campus decision makers and scientists, organizational university context, funds unavailability and innovations' supply-pushed characteristics. An increased understanding of these barriers and the practices to overcome them is crucial for universities' campus decision makers to actively engage in the adoption of internal campus innovations.

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Campus as inter-disciplinary technological playground for sustainable technology experiments and implementation is a dream TU Delft strives for. However, innovation implementation on the university campus is nonetheless considered a risk due to the embedded uncertainty of any innovation. This uncertainty leads to several questions about the decisions to implement innovations on campus. Answering this question is the motivation behind this study, aimed at enabling effective implementation of innovation on our campus. We identified the decision making criteria used by a variety of employees who regularly face innovation implementation challenges on campus on campus.

We used two decision support systems to identify and explain the relative importance of the decision making criteria. The first approach was executed by a TU Delft spin-off Councyl.ai. Councyl.ai’s decision support model was built to identify the decision-making criteria and then through a choice experiment identify the relative weight of those criteria.

In a second approach, the PAS design and decision approach, developed by Prof. Monique Arkesteijn from TU Delft (2019), was used to develop the decision framework and relative importance of each criteria.

This project has been successful in distilling the most important criteria used during implicit assessment of innovation projects on campus, a great achievement in itself. However these two approaches do not indicate the same relative weight of the decision-making criteria, suggesting that innovation projects are very diverse and the importance of criteria change along with the project description and context for implementation.

This brings us one step closer to clearly communicating to innovators and amongst ourselves which decision-making criteria are implicitly taken into consideration for implementation of innovation on campus. It clarifies the steps that need to be taken to manage and mitigate risk, and increase the likelihood of innovators registering their interest in placing their innovations on campus, as well as the likelihood that campus managers will allocate the necessary resources to the project.

We trust this report, in conjunction with the other research projects run at the Campus research team, will be beneficial in providing the necessary support for decision making about sustainable innovation on the university campus. Making the campus a reputable technological showroom of every aspirational clean energy, climate adaptive and circular innovation on the TU Delft campus and beyond.@en

Internationally, the ambition to achieve a sustainable built environment is becoming urgent. On the university campus, this vision, combined with unparalleled access to innovative technologies for sustainable development enables/urges universities to implement more innovative solutions more often. As a prime test location, the university campus is uniquely able to serve as a context for living labs, implementing and testing innovative technologies in a real-world environment. However, implementation of innovation on campus requires a clear vision, intentional action and transdisciplinary collaboration, while innovations themselves pose several challenges to the business-as-usual way of work. To explore the role of campus real estate managers in innovation implementation decisions on the university campus, a literature review and a qualitative study among campus managers of 13 Dutch universities were conducted. The research explored the innovation project types, risks, drivers and barriers and the real estate management responsibilities and decision criteria in innovation implementation projects. As one of the outputs of this research, a comprehensive categorization framework was developed. It clarifies campus managers’ decision-making dimensions for innovative sustainability project implementation on campus and highlights the sustainability objectives unique to universities. If implemented across universities, it could further strengthen the networked economy by identifying opportunities for cross-campus implementation of innovative projects for sustainability.@en

The purpose of this article is to describe the effects of university governance on campus management based on the examples of the Netherlands and Poland. The study connected theory on campus management with a concept of five dimensions of university governance (autonomy, management, participation, accountability and transparency) into an innovative and coherent analytical framework. Based on a qualitative approach, legal regulations and all public universities’ campus goals in both countries were analysed. The results indicate that university governance and each of its five dimensions stir consequences on campus management. This suggests that any university governance reforms should take real estate and facilities into account. Disregarding them can lead to universities’ suboptimal decisions and consequently affect (directly or indirectly) their sustainable development, productivity, profitability and competitive advantage. An understanding of the presented conception is crucial for the construction of viable higher education policy and improvement of universities performance.

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