New Business Model for Value Co-creation in Smarter Universities

the aim of this paper is to build and discuss a new business model for the smarter universities, which can integrate social, economic and sustainability drivers exploiting at the maximum level the potentialities of smart technologies in order to value co-create for all the stakeholders involved. We believe that the integration of all these elements is crucial for making a smarter university successful. The question we seek to answer in this article is: How can universities integrate economic, social, sustainable and technological aspects in a view of value co-creation and represent it in a Smarter New Business Model? This paper is organised in five sections, including this introduction. Section 2 starts to analyse the concept of “smart” and arrives to define the features of the smarter university. In the third section, we consider the Triple Helix and the Quadruple Helix models in order to interpret the new role that the university have in the last years. The fourth section describes the new business model for the smarter university, presents the scope of the framework, its components and the relationship between them. In the last section, we summarize the conclusions of the study and some considerations for further research.