ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the sense and nonsense of comparing higher education–industry relationships across countries. It discusses the conditions under which international benchmarking leads to potentially deleterious policy conclusions and underlines the importance of context specificity. It argues for more attention to the dynamics of local learning, taken here to mean the absorptive capacities of a range of economic actors. It concludes by showing how research into the conditions of local learning can shed light on how regions or countries might make it easier for economic actors ‘to learn how to learn’ or, in other words, to bridge the gap between lessons from elsewhere and their own absorptive capacities.
