ABSTRACT
The three case study universities in this chapter – Stanford on the west coast, Louisville in one of the Southern states (Kentucky) and Princeton on the east coast – occupy very different positions within the US national and state/regional systems of innovation. Stanford and Princeton are both private universities but come from very different traditions. Stanford is often described as the driving force for Silicon Valley’s evolution, while Princeton, an ‘Ivy League university’, although famous for its undergraduate teaching and research, has come very late to its territorial role. Louisville is a relatively unknown university in a state that is famous for the Kentucky Derby and the ‘Louisville Lip’ (Mohammed Ali) but which is interesting in this context because of the ‘Bucks for Brains’ programme designed to stimulate economic growth through its universities. Each of the three illustrates responses to changing political agendas in which the territorial role is increasingly prioritized at state, but not necessarily at the national, level. The chapter proceeds by identifying student and research profiles of the three universities and then takes each case study in turn beginning with the west coast and moving east.
