Thought leadership in practice

Brittany Williams: Hi, I’m Brittany Williams from iResearch Services, welcome to Thought Leadership in Practice. 

Thought leadership is about using your expertise and insights to shape conversations, influence thinking, and drive meaningful change in your industry. 

I’m excited to be here today to showcase some truly bold and effective examples of exactly that. We’re highlighting work that doesn’t just inform: it influences and inspires real change within industries. Today’s conversation is all about celebrating innovative thinking that moves the needle and creates lasting impact. 

Speaking of celebration, we’re here because of the inaugural TLFT Awards by iResearch Services—our first-ever Thought Leadership Awards, recognizing the most impactful work across industries. These awards honor campaigns and initiatives that don’t just generate buzz; they create meaningful influence and drive real conversations forward. 

I’m thrilled to introduce our guests today: the brilliant minds behind this year’s TLFT Awards Industry Catalyst Award winner. 

Joining me is Dmitrii Malkov from Elsevier and Renee Westenbrink from Eindhoven University of Technology. Together, they spearheaded the “Towards the Fourth Generation University” initiative, a campaign that truly embodies what the Industry Catalyst Award recognizes: work that sparks significant influence within an industry or sector. 

Dmitrii, Renee, welcome to the show. 

Renee Westenbrink: Thank you. 

Brittany: I’d like to dig in and ask you to start by filling us in on this initiative. What was the goal behind this initiative? What were you trying to do? 

Renee: At Eindhoven University of Technology, we see ourselves as a driver of the innovation ecosystem in Eindhoven, which is characterized by a high level of high-tech systems with companies like Philips, ASML, and NXP. 

We really wanted to strengthen our strategy and focus our role on the needs of the broader ecosystem—not just individual companies, but the ecosystem as a whole. With traditional indicators… we don’t get far. So, we partnered with Elsevier to see how we could sharpen the way we measure our performance, sharpen our profile, and tell our story as a university—of being a driver of that innovation ecosystem. 

If we did that correctly, it would also help us to enhance our strategy and do it better in the future. 

Brittany: Building ecosystem-level indicators is a lot more complicated than building something for a defined company, so how did you approach it? 

Dmitrii Malkov: If I may—and also to add to the previous question—our role at Elsevier is that of a convener and facilitator. The part of the company where I work is called ‘Academic & Government’ and its role is to support universities, funders, and government agencies with smarter, more evidence-based decisions. So that exactly aligns with what TU/e was trying to achieve. 

So we wanted to help TU/e build this community of practice and create an assessment framework that would enable them and other universities that are aspiring to become “Fourth Generation Universities” to measure success along this journey. And also to understand how they can compare one university to another without necessarily creating a ranking system—most of the universities in the 4GU community don’t want to make this another ranking exercise. 

Brittany: That makes a lot of sense; there’s a lot of that around. So, as a result of this initiative, what’s changed? What did you find, how was it received? 

Renee: If we look at the university community, there is a lot of  enthusiasm. We find that many universities, especially in Europe, but all around the world—Australia, Japan, and the US—have exactly the same questions: how can we measure ourselves better? How can we tell our story better? How can we evolve into this new role of the university of driving an innovation ecosystem? So we encountered a lot of enthusiasm, which I’m glad about because it also enables us to identify partners in Europe and around the world to further improve ourselves. 

Dmitrii: At Elsevier, we have been trying for quite some time to move into the direction of creating new measures of  economic and societal impact assessment. So this partnership with TU/e helped us raise our own bar in terms of how we approach research assessment and how we contextualize it within the specific goals that the universities might have.  

The idea is that a 4GU is a university that is really aspiring to orchestrate its regional innovation ecosystem in partnership with government, with industry, and with civil society—that’s the official definition that we have arrived at as a community. 

Measuring this is a very non-trivial task; there are very few existing indicators that would enable you to quantitatively measure these things. Therefore, for us, one change is that we have really raised our own bar on how we approach thinking about this around this assessment. 

Brittany: That’s phenomenal. Partnerships can tend to do that. 

I’m wondering too—it sounds like a lot of enthusiastic reception from various stakeholders, but did you face any resistance? Were there challenges to trying to draw this together? What did that look like? 

Renee: We encountered a lot of enthusiasm, and no big obstacles in the beginning. The challenges that we encountered is that a lot of these indicators are not exactly comparable internationally. Countries differ, ecosystems differ, universities differ. Figures for Eindhoven University are not always comparable to other universities. We really made a breakthrough here—that we got to new indicators [to] compare across countries around the world. It enables us to identify universities that are doing great in different ways to Eindhoven, which we can learn from. That is great new insight that we gained with this with this study, and we really want to continue this with the community: to share our best practices; to learn from each other. [Aligned with] the concept of this Fourth-Generation University—to really be this driver of the Innovation ecosystem. In the report, you will see that the ecosystem of say, Munich, or Copenhagen, really differs from that from Eindhoven—in terms of partners, in terms of size, and in terms of what actually comes out of it. That really is a big new insight.  

Brittany: And anything that’s publicly shared, we can make sure we share with our listeners for them to follow up and read more. 

You mentioned too, we’re at the start of this. Can you describe how you would like to see this grow: is it reach? Is it new indicators? Refining the methodology? Where are you looking to take this initiative going forward, now that it’s established? 

Dmitrii: As of now, there is an international board for the community, which consists of 12 founding member universities. These are universities that are undoubtedly 4GU—TU/e is obviously one of them, there are others. 

Then there are three working groups, which each have a different purpose. There’s one that is working on the evolution of the actual concept. It’s where we decide how to make this concept inclusive, but not to the extent where everybody just wants this label by default—that’s not what we want. You really need to aspire to become a 4GU; it needs to be an important part of your mission—not just a peripheral aspiration. 

Then there is the indicators group, which is a bit more technical, where work is being done on finding the appropriate indicators to measure success, thinking about how we can normalize these indicators, if we are missing any indicators, how we allow the universities to contribute data, etc. 

And then there is a community working group that champions the concept, trying to recruit new members and engage the community. 

That’s the structure that we have right now. Then on top of it, there will be an assessment framework to determine if new community members are aligned with the concept of 4GU. This decision will be based on the indicators and data—some provided by the universities, some provided by Elsevier—and there will be a decision made by the board on whether a new member university is aligned with the 4GU concept or not. But the assessment framework will be contextualized to each specific university and each specific innovation ecosystem. We won’t be applying the same indicators and the same assessment criteria to all universities like rankings do; we’ll be trying to contextualize the assessments with the unique indicators and the unique data to measure the unique path towards the 4GU identity. 

Brittany: You’ve mentioned a couple of times that this is not a ranking. Is that a common misconception? Is that something that you’re fighting against? 

Dmitrii: There’s a comment sentiment among the universities that rankings don’t do justice to what some universities are trying to achieve. As Renee said, they’re trying to build regional socioeconomic embeddedness and to govern the innovation ecosystem. But existing rankings do nothing to measure that, and there’s very little that universities can do to push the rankings in that direction—it’s not in the interest of the rankings to pursue these very specific analytical dimensions. So this whole [4GU] community has been assembled to pursue this goal. 

Brittany: It’s fascinating. I could talk about how to govern an innovation ecosystem all day. Is there anything else that we didn’t touch on in terms of the project? I want to ask some more general questions about how both of your teams approach these types of research and publishing projects. 

Dmitrii, I’ll start with you. Elsevier does a lot of publishing—a lot of research. How is that structured? Who owns it? How do you involve subjectmatter experts, and how do you create the foundation to make partnerships like this work? 

Dmitrii: The short answer is that thought leadership at Elsevier—which is a very big company—is shared, and it’s distributed; it’s not a centralized program. There is a specific program and specific people dedicated to thought leadership, but whenever a thoughtleadership initiative comes about, there is a collective decision made about how we use our valuable resources and capabilities across the business. By that I mean our data analytics capabilities, our data assets, our market research, global research networks, even our peer-reviewed journals and the main experts who support the peer-reviewed journals. [We ask:] how do we create an appropriate mix of these capabilities and these people and skills to support a given thought leadership initiative? There’s no fixed algorithm—it’s very organic. 

As I said, there are dedicated people and programs for thought leadership, but it’s not always up to them to decide who will be working on what. It is a natural, case-by-case process where we create a team to work on a thought leadership initiative. 

For example, I happened to be very lucky to work on the initial report, and our team—the analytics and data services team within Elsevier—was given this opportunity because of our multiple capabilities and our data assets. 

Brittany: That tracks with a lot of what we hear from organizations; there are so many inputs of information, and it becomes an organizational challenge to figure out how to do the best with everything. 

Renee, you mentioned the university is always looking for good partners and people. How do you qualify those partners? What are you looking for when you’re looking to partner with companies on projects like this? 

Renee: The first thing is always [asking], “Do you have a shared goal?” 

We have a shared interest in solving this specific question, but as a university we feel lucky to collaborate with a company like Elsevier. Elsevier is a major player in the academic world, and if you really want to develop these indicators on a multinational scale, you need a partner with the ability to do that. Elsevier has that ability. 

Also, because they are such a big player in the academic world, I think [Elsevier] understands our question very well. We could not have done this with just any data company.  

And there’s a feeling for us both that this is a new development—we have to explore territory that is not really well known. Of course, we stand on the shoulders of previous initiatives, like the initiative of The European University Association (EUA) and the joint research centers in Europe that have done great studies focused on the role of the university in these innovation ecosystems. We’re not alone by far—that’s also why I think the enthusiasm is so strong. But [forming] this partnership to take the next step is really valuable. 

Brittany: You’re getting into what I wanted to ask about next, which is about deciding what research to focus on. Did you see this space that you were moving into as blank, with a need to create something new? You mentioned standing on the shoulders of previous research—can you talk a little bit more about what you were building on versus trying to build from scratch? 

Dmitrii: Previous studies done by the EUA and other organizations use indicators, but these indicators are not comparable across nations—everybody has their own. So you have to rely on qualitative stories, basically. They identified best practices, but we really wanted to take a step further. Can we make this into a methodology? Can we make this into a dashboard that could be used by multiple universities?  

And then we found that lots of universities have exactly the same question, and we really need to collaborate with data experts and databases, but also with the key insights from the academics. 

And that’s why this concept of this fourth generation is so important: it’s firmly rooted in academic knowledge, which we can take into the next 10-15 years to further develop this role of the university. 

Renee: When we were designing the indicators, we were inspired by a lot of the previous work. If you look at the indicators themselves, none of them are necessarily new. But it’s the way we contextualize these indicators for the assessment and contextualize the application of the assessment framework itself: when we [evaluate] alignment with the 4GU concept, we put the university being assessed in the driver’s seat. 

For example, we will be giving multiple opportunities for the universities to decide what they define as their innovation ecosystem. [Geographically,] is that a 25-kilometer radius from the University? Is it a 100-kilometer radius? Is it a specific geographical area not even close to the university, if for some reason, they are targeting somewhere that is a bit further away? It’s a very different thing to be a university in a large metropolitan area or in a peripheral industrial region. We really want the universities to be able to have a say, and tell us, “We want to be assessed for our contribution to this specific innovation ecosystem.” 

On top of this, we want the universities to be able to decide the specific indicators that they want to be assessed against, from a menu of analytical dimensions—education research, valorization, and governance—each with a number of quantitative indicators. But the way that universities achieve their 4GU aspirations will differ quite widely. So we want the universities to be able to pick the indicators that they want to be assessed against and in the end, as a result of this, it’s not a ranking. Even if you want to compare one university to another, you will really be comparing universities that have chosen exactly the same indicators in the first place. So there’s a series of choices during the assessment process where the university is very much involved in the process as opposed to being [restricted by] an assessment framework. 

Brittany: That’s fascinating; The agency that the universities can demonstrate in that is really is novel, and I can see why you’re fighting against the ranking assumption. 

There’s a lot of stakeholders that you’re trying to communicate a lot of really complex information to. So I’m curious in general: about your communication with the universities and with the public; about the choices have you made; about how to start building from your 12 founding universities and your working groups out into something bigger. How are you getting the word out?  

Renee: There have been a lot of public appearances and conferences, where there have been ample opportunities to engage with potential new community members. Dmitrii, do you have a take on this? 

Dmitrii: Yes… We didn’t start with the idea that we would create this big international community. We started with, “can we, as a university, develop a novel approach to identify this role of the university?” As we discovered that we were answering questions that many other universities have, we really wanted to take it a step forward.  

The first step we took is inviting other universities to act as founding partners of the community—these are specifically universities that may be more or less similar to Eindhoven, but that have exactly the same question. I think that has a basis to build an even larger community which is not only European—which is worldwide, so also encompasses other cultures, other academic cultures perhaps. 

This format has grown quite naturally to us, and I think has a huge promise to share expertise, to share approaches, to share best practices. With that, we can extend the initial question that we had at Eindhoven, to a question that other universities in the world can now try to answer. 

Brittany: That’s great. It’s interesting that you say you weren’t aiming to create a community from the beginning but that’s what ended up happening. 

So how are you planning to measure success of this initiative, and how has that evolved? How were you thinking about measuring success in the very beginning and how do you look at that today?  

Dmitrii: Early on, we saw that we were able to tell a rather compelling story using the data and indicators that we designed for this assessment. So, this was already some measure of success—that we succeeded in in creating a compelling story in a compelling assessment. But then, of course, the actual measure of success came much later, when the community started to gather. 

Just hearing about the different paths that the universities are taking to become a 4GU university is fascinating and gives us a lot of motivation. A lot of the universities expressed that they have [already] been working in almost a parallel school of thought to 4GU, but they decided to be more cooperative and collaborative to join forces. So that was a true measure of success to us. 

Brittany: Wonderful. I have a couple of rapid-fire questions to end our episode, but before that, anything you’ve learned from this initiative, or any advice you would give for those looking to try to start something? 

Renee: If I may add, Dmitrii said that our novel approach was to not only develop new things but also to put existing things into a new context. For us as a university, that is really true. Universities are always asking, “What do we do?” “What do our students want?” “What do our researchers want?” But in this specific initiative, we also [asked] “What is the strategy of our government, and the strategy of our region?” Because our government has identified 10 ‘key enabling technologies’ that should be prioritised for the Netherlands, and our region has prioritized several of these key enabling technologies. 

So for us this was also a test: could we measure our performance on the strategic priorities of our government and of our region? We tried to take an outside-in approach to see how the university strategy is working with the priorities that are set by other organizations. 

Also, the geolocation factor is really a different perspective on how you work as a university, because most universities are global players—we do this for knowledge in in general, and our students end up everywhere. But really to see how you interact with your environment is a novelvation. It’s something really new for us in this project 

Brittany: Well, to wrap us up. I hope you guys are ready for some rapid-fire questions and answers. I’m looking at Dmitrii, so I’m going to ask you to start—give us your answer, and then Renee. What is a piece of content that has inspired you, either past or present? 

Dmitrii: Specifically with respect to 4GU there’s been a lot of interesting academic work that predates the concept. As early as 2010, for example, there was work done by Elvira Uyarra, a researcher at Manchester University. She published a fantastic framework around the original roles of universities, where she talked about how different missions can create mission overload. 

So you cannot aspire to be a fourth-generation university at the same time as [pursuing] something completely different or even something complementary but that would drag your attention in that direction too much. You really need to be dedicating resources to becoming a 4G University—as I said before, it’s not something you can do just on the side. 

Renee: I meantioned earlier the European University Association; they did this study in 2019 specifically about the role of universities in these ecosystems, and that echoed exactly what we were thinking about in Eindhoven when our researchers defined that that 4GU model. They did it in a really wonderful way, also encompassing the entirety of Europe. That was a big inspiration for us. 

Brittany: Yeah, I love this. I love that question. I love those answers. Thank you. It’s good to know where some of this came from. 

A more general question. What’s the best feedback or compliment? You’ve received on your professional work? It can be related to this project, or you can just share a good moment. 

Dmitrii: This specific report has produced a very generous amount of positive feedback. I’m very grateful. I think the best compliment really is just seeing how it resonates with the community and how it has struck the right chords. 

Renee: At one of our recent events at the University, the person who came up with this fourth generation reached out and said we were really successful in putting concrete measurements on the table to take the concept and make it usable for other universities. And that universities have this role in society, and if we can strengthen this role in society, then we’re doing it for the greater good. That for me was a huge compliment. 

Brittany: Wonderful. You don’t get that kinda compliment from just looking at the numbers. Ok. If you could establish a standard or best practice within the thought leadership industry. What would it be? 

Dmitrii: I would say if you can manage to build an inclusive and collaborative community, that seemingly will help a lot because that’s been the case with the 4GU initiative. 

Brittany: The power of community is pretty clear in this initiative for sure. 

Renee: I second that one hundred percent. And if we can get the members of this community to build it even further, and go further than we have gone so far, that would be great. 

Brittany: This is a general business question; if you could retire one piece of jargon, what piece of jargon would you retire? 

Dmitrii: Specifically in the context of research assessment and evaluation, people throw around terms like “research excellence” and “impact” without context. I think it’s really important to contextualize those terms—that’s exactly what we’re doing as part of the initiative as well. 

Renee: My first thought was also “Excellence.” Excellence is very important but you have to pinpoint what you understand it to be and make it concrete, make it usable for people. people. Otherwise it’s just an empty pocket. 

Brittany: Jargon in general: Usually a placeholder for actual thoughts. 

All right. Last question, please complete this sentence: Great thought leadership always… 

Dmitrii: Great thought leadership always inspires action, not just endless dialogue. 

Renee: Great thought leadership always is able to connect with many partners who share the same burning question. 

Brittany: Thank you both for the time spent talking to me; Dmitrii Malkov, Renee Westenbrink, I’m really grateful for you both. We’ll see you again hopefully in a future episode—I’d love to check in on how this community has grown in the future. All the best to you and to the initiative.  

Renee: Thank you for having us. 

Dmitrii: It’s been a pleasure, thank you