A changing role for universities in the periphery

An international research on interactions between universities and firms is an opportunity to investigate this subject beyond the developed countries. This project involves 12 countries from three continents: Africa (South Africa, Nigeria and Uganda), Asia (South Korea, China, India, Thailand and Malaysia) and Latin America (Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina and Brazil). This paper introduces a theoretical framework to deal with this broad set of countries, their different levels of NSI formation and their different levels of development. This framework may help public policies to understand the role of universities for a country search for an “active insertion in the international division of labor”.