Guest editorial

Citation

Nenonen, S. (2018), "Guest editorial", Journal of Corporate Real Estate, Vol. 20 No. 2, pp. 82-83. https://doi.org/10.1108/JCRE-03-2018-0009

Strategic campus management

This special issue is devoted to papers focused on strategic campus management and learning environments. Many universities are preparing new campus strategies, blending an entrepreneurial focus on stimulating spin-offs and promoting innovation with social inclusion and responsibility for the local community agenda. University campuses are seen as social hubs for all manners of creative pursuits. They are platforms for education in a global age, affecting learner identity, collaboration and organisational power structures – both in digital and physical forms.

This special issue includes research focusing on innovative solutions for creating inclusive, creative, accessible, sustainable and smart campuses, a network of places supported by corporate real estate management. Campus development is no longer about the construction of lecture halls; the academic workplace is not necessarily a traditional office anymore, and services are provided by using digital infrastructure as a platform.

All papers take a development perspective and the scale is diverse. Campus and city connection is an interesting source for innovation. What are the elements that can be supported by corporate real estate management in terms of enhancing innovation? What kinds of environments, services and tools help us develop campuses to attract and retain excellent researchers, teachers and students now and in the future? How to support interdisciplinarity and collaboration? What is the role of a campus and the city – how does the ecosystem function?

We need more models and frameworks, as well as evidence to transform the university campus into an inclusive, creative, sustainable and smart urban community for the future. What kind of strategic choices campus management needs to align corporate real estate management? What are the most effective spatial, economical and socio-cultural strategies for transforming the campus into an inclusive, vibrant and accessible urban community? How to develop underutilised assets of campuses?

Many of these questions remain unanswered. This special issue provides theoretical frameworks and evidence-based learning environment development in terms of the use of smart tools and investigations of both user experience and user behaviour.

The first paper “Campus development as catalyst for innovation” written by Flavia Curvelo Magdaniel, Hans De Jonge and Alexandra Den Heijer seeks to model the relationship between innovation and real estate. Before, the emphasis has been focused on workplace level, but the authors are more concerned about the campus and urban level and they end up discussing the location of the campus in and around the city. Based on their findings, campus development facilitates five conditions required to stimulate innovation through decisions and interventions over long-term periods. They propose a framework for clarifying the path to stimulate innovation through real estate, which will allow campus managers to steer their real estate strategies in line with this specific organisational goal and to better communicate how their decisions add value to their organisations.

The second paper “Smart campus tools – Adding value to the university campus by measuring space use real-time” by Bart Valks and Monique Arkesteijn challenges the campus management and corporate real estate management with the question of data and smart tools. They discuss the use of smart tools in practice but are concerned that research on the subject is still scarce. By providing a framework for smart tools and exploring the work done in theory and in practice, the authors hope to increase discussion and research on the subject from the perspective of corporate real estate. The challenges are discussed in the context of Dutch Universities but they take into account the European perspective too: smart tools provide us with possibilities to apply resource wisdom in campus management, where the real estate portfolio requires refurbishment and development.

The third paper by Inka Sankari, “A call for co-working – users’ expectations regarding learning spaces in higher education”, focuses on development of learning spaces in higher education from the perspective of co-working space. Co-working spaces are shared workplaces utilised by different sorts of knowledge professionals, mostly freelancers, working in various degrees of specialisation in the vast domain of the knowledge industry. How does this trend appear in academic learning environments? The data are gathered by using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Sankari identifies that characteristics of academic co-working places are community, multipurpose office, high accessibility and attractive workplace. A less applicable co-working space characteristic is space as a service.

The fourth paper “Physical location of smart key activators – a building security penetration test” is written by Jan-Willem Bullee and provides a study of a penetration test involving smart locks in the context of building security. The contribution of this study is to show how experimental psychology can be used to determine the cost–benefit analysis (CBA) of physical building security measures.

Together the four papers probably do not fulfil the stated purpose “to emphasise the strategic campus development and campus management”. Instead, the papers form a set of heterogeneous scales linked to corporate real estate and campus management, as well as new insights into what we know and what we need to know about campus management, thereby contributing to the advancements in corporate real estate knowledge. As an editor, I would like to thank the authors for offering us their findings, ideas and food for thought.