Universities as strategic navigators: place leadership in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area

ABSTRACT This article investigates university place leadership within the context of a politically asymmetrical cross-border regional innovation system – China’s state-steered, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. We conceptualise place leadership as a process of strategic navigation, where universities manage two sets of tensions: (1) the strategic posture between state compliance and organisational opportunity and (2) the locus of their legitimacy between local political endorsement and global academic prestige. Based on a comparative analysis of seven universities, we develop a series of navigational profiles, revealing how universities mobilise resources and shape visions, offering insights for the study of place leadership and cross-border innovation.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Regional studies

• Publication date

  2025-11-10

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/00343404.2025.2567917
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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