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Spin-off companies are generally considered a promising vehicle for developing academic knowledge into products that are ready for the market. In this paper the authors explore under what circumstances spin-off companies can serve as a source of knowledge for the research organization from which they originate. The paper brings together literature from different academic fields to construct an analytical framework for investigating knowledge feedback mechanisms between spin-off companies and their parent research organizations. The authors illustrate the application of this framework in six case studies of parent-spin-off couples in the water technology sector. These case studies show that the interaction with spin-off companies can yield important cognitive benefits for the academic research process, such as an improvement of the research agenda and new insights about the practical operation of theoretical models and technologies. These benefits were facilitated mainly by staff exchange, collaborative research and personal contacts.

As Europe is faced with increasing droughts and extreme precipitation, countries are taking measures to adapt to these changes. It is challenging, however, to navigate through the wide range of possible measures, taking into account the efficacy, economic impact and social justice aspects of these measures, as well as the governance requirements for implementing them. This article describes and evaluates an approach to selecting and analysing climate change adaptation measures that was applied at six research sites across Europe. It describes the steps that were taken in collecting, selecting and analysing adaptation measures, in a process with local stakeholders, with concrete examples from the case studies. The governance analysis focuses on the requirements associated with the measures and the extent to which these requirements are met at the research sites. The socio-economic impact focuses on the efficacy of the measures in reducing the risks and the broad range of tools available to compare the measures on their societal impact. Finally, the social justice analysis focuses on the distributive impacts of the adaptation measures. In the discussion, we identify some key findings with regard to the different kind of measures. In the conclusion we briefly assess the main pros and cons of the different analyses that were conducted. The main conclusion is that although the research sites were very different in both the challenges and the institutional context, the approach presented here yielded decision relevant outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social and institutional context of infrastructure planning has shifted tremendously over recent decades. From top–down implementation, infrastructure planners are now forced to incorporate the demands and wishes of citizens and other external stakeholders. This paper adopts the analytical perspective of institutional work to analyse how a number of Dutch infrastructure planning organisations try to remain in control over these changes in their institutional context. Building on social systems thinking, this paper distinguishes three environments in which this control can play out: the internal environment over which an organisation has complete control, an external environment over which an organisation has little control and a transactional environment where the organisation, through its interactions with other actors, can influence institutional development. The paper concludes that while most forms of institutional work applied by the infrastructure planning organisations under study aim to change the organisations' interactions with stakeholders, the forms of institutional work are predominantly located within the internal environment of planning organisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to climate change, many national governments are shifting their focus from ‘safety’ to ‘spatial-planning’ measures in flood governance. Rather than providing full protection against floods, spatial-planning measures aim to reduce the impacts of floods by encouraging damage mitigation in local-level spatial-planning and building choices. This turn to spatial-planning measures has important implications for how costs and responsibilities are divided in flood governance. This paper examines the role of experts in shaping the distributive aspects of this shift. Using a theoretical framework on institutional change, the role of experts is analyzed in two case studies. The first focuses on the United States, where a turn to spatial-planning measures was made in the 1960s. The second case study looks at this turn Dutch flood governance, which has always been characterized by a strong safety paradigm. The paper draws conclusions about the effects of expert-influence on distributive decision-making underlying institutional changes in both cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]