**1. Introduction**

The growing importance of innovation as a mechanism for economic development has given rise to a broad strand of studies examining how learning processes get unevenly located in space, within centers of innovative activity commonly considered as innovation ecosystems [1]. Besides market structures, technological capabilities, entrepreneurship, government and regulations, culture, service infrastructure, and human capital, the local presence of research-oriented universities plays a key role in learning and innovation [2–4]. The university goes beyond the traditional duties of teaching and research and assumes an entrepreneurial function for enhancing regional economic development. Companies take on an educational role, training students and workers in the skills set needed for advanced manufacturing. These novel interdependencies create value in the interactive dynamics that engage knowledgeutilizing and knowledge-generating structures [5–7].

Within regional science and innovation literature, knowledge spillovers build on the idea of proximity between firms and universities [8]. In business studies, the notion of knowledge ecosystem points to cognitive assets and participatory processes that create, explore, and use a shared knowledge base for the benefit of all actors [6, 9]. Social policy research identifies universities as situated spaces of learning and contamination between disciplines and territories, where research, teaching, and the third mission align with emancipatory and democratic paradigms. University institutional engagement attempts to relate social groups that lines of spatial, social, and relational segregation separate over time [10, 11]. Social structures of space are not mere containers where university-industry collaborations (UICs) play out, but their constitutive dimensions that interact with interregional disparities, but also intraregional and intra-urban inequalities [12]. Thus, university-led innovation may unfold not only along multiscalar processes across territorial contexts, often peripheral urban areas, but also platforms that relate distant actors and social groups. The digital landscape has allowed for enhanced multisited analysis of problems and relational dynamics that occur in a "g-local" context; hence, interdependencies emerge across both physical and virtual connections that bring high-income and less-developed regions together [13, 14].

This chapter aims to situate the debate on university-led innovation at the nexus of regional development and business innovation studies to understand the multiple factors that affect the sustainability of knowledge-based value creation in universityindustry collaborations [15]. By exploring co-innovation, the analysis addresses the following two guiding questions:


To answer these questions, I examine the digital training partnerships the University of Naples has established with Big Tech such as Apple, Cisco, Deloitte, Capgemini, and some other advanced manufacturing companies within aerospace, railways, pharmaceutics, and infrastructure. I draw on the extensive fieldwork conducted within the campus of San Giovanni between 2019 and 2022 to examine how local innovative performance has emerged with regional development policy implications [16, 17]. This chapter contributes to three major topics in university-led innovation, that is, university-industry collaborations (UICs), innovation ecosystems, and the models of university system. In addition, assessing multiscalar knowledge-based value creation, this chapter contributes to the emerging literature on the social impact evaluation of the university's third mission (see [18]).

This chapter is organized in four sections. The next section, Section 2, reviews university-led innovation theories, focusing on the logic of the knowledge ecosystem. The research design section, Section 3, describes the case study approach that analyzes the complexity of interdependencies in UICs. The findings section, Section 4, examines UICs, their value creation strategy, and results. In the final section, Conclusion, I will then discuss the implications of the findings for regional development and offer concluding remarks.

*Assessing Interdependencies in Innovation Ecosystems: Evidence from the Training Partnerships… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.112558*
