The campus evaluated

Abstract

Campuses have recently drawn attention from governing organisations in the Netherlands and are identified as promising types of office- and university development on national, regional and company levels (Wiebes, 2019). Millions of dollars are invested in campuses by local and regional governments in order to attract businesses and jobs towards the respective regions and to stimulate innovation and Research & Design (Baggerman, 2020; Gruijthuijsen, 2020; Knop, 2020; Wiebes, 2019). However, the title ‘campus’ is not protected nor has an undisputed definition and therefore is subject to inflation (Magdaniel, De Jonge, & Den Heijer, 2018). This leads to the contradiction that public money is invested in initiatives that can differ in various ways and therefore remain unclear in how they should be managed successfully and what they deliver for their users. Researches state that clustering people and businesses leads to more innovation (Belso-Martínez, Mas-Verdu, & Chinchilla-Mira, 2020; Bolter & Robey, 2020; Glaeser, 2010; Guzman, 2019). Campus developments rest on the same principles. However, when approaching a campus from the demand side a campus should deliver the user preferences demanded by real estate users. This in order to attract them to the physical location and play a positive role in incubating and facilitating the respective real estate users (Ng, Junker, Appel-Meulenbroek, Cloodt, & Arentze, 2020; Remøy & van der Voordt, 2014). In order to reduce uncertainty surrounding campuses for policy makers, managers and users, these developments have to be redefined on what they are, what they intend to deliver and if that what is supplied matches the demand. Therefore the following main question will be answered; What are the perceived benefits campuses deliver for its real estate users? This will be answered by making use of literature study covering the definition and theoretical benefits. Secondly a case study towards four different campuses will be executed. This case study will consist of semi-structured interviews with both start-up and scale-up companies and the respective campus management teams in order to establish what benefits are delivered by locating on a campus. Followingly these results will be analysed and compared in order to build conclusions.