Opinion
For decades, universities have oscillated between centralisation and decentralisation and expanded or contracted their physical footprints in response to changing strategic and financial conditions.
Increasingly, the challenges universities are being asked to address – workforce shortages, health inequity, sovereign capability, climate change and economic transition – cannot be solved by universities acting alone. They require collaborative ecosystems of innovation and knowledge, and so precincts are quickly becoming one of the primary mechanisms through which those responses are organised.
Precincts differ from traditional campuses. They aren’t simply additional sites for teaching and research activity. They are places like Cambridge, or Melbourne’s Parkville Precinct, where universities operate alongside hospitals, governments, industry, investors, research institutes, entrepreneurs and communities to address complex societal and economic challenges.
We have health precincts tackling the future of health, defence and security precincts building national capability in new organisational environments where the university must operate as an ecosystem participant, and at times, an ecosystem convenor. Many contemporary universities, including my own, UNSW Sydney, are no longer simply multi-campus institutions; they are becoming multi-precinct universities deeply embedded within broader innovation ecosystems.
This distinction matters, because multi-campus models, and in particular governance and organisational structures, are not designed for this level of inter-organisational complexity.
The campus model prioritises an efficient method of delivering distributed institutional activity under models of strict centralised strategy, but can be poorly suited to environments where value creation depends on influence rather than authority, partnership rather than control, and shared outcomes over institutional outputs.
Precincts demand another layer. They require precinct capability. That is, the institution’s ability to align place, partnerships, investment, knowledge creation and community engagement to create value, while maintaining strategic alignment with the broader university. Precinct capability is adaptive, relational and entrepreneurial. It depends not only on the institution itself, but its capacity to influence and partner with a network of actors with different objectives, incentives and importantly, measures of success.
The Randwick Health & Innovation Precinct provides a practical example of this in action. The bringing together of a major research-intensive university (UNSW Sydney), several teaching hospitals, medical research institutes, industry partners and government within a single connected environment has led to one of Australia’s most significant concentrations of health, research and innovation capability.
It’s a community of approximately 17,000 staff, 7,000 researchers and 80,000 students, with more than one million patient interactions each year.
The precinct has required new governance structures, innovative operating models, new ways of managing shared assets, and deep trust between like-minded organisations to do more together than we can achieve alone. Over time, it’s becoming more connected to emerging hospital-anchored ecosystems in Darlinghurst, Wagga Wagga and globally, creating opportunities for the university to share knowledge across networks, build capability and accelerate transformation in health.
I believe we are on the cusp of a new generation of operating models for universities, anchored not simply in campuses, but in mission-based ecosystems.
Governing bodies and university leaders must move beyond asking how multiple campuses should be managed and begin asking how multiple ecosystems will be managed.
Success will depend less on replicating the traditional university model and more on developing precincts that are agile, differentiated, connected, sustainable and strategically aligned.
The university of the future may not be defined by the number of places it operates in, but rather its ability, through new operating models, to create value through the place-based networks it enables.
Professor Zoe Terpening is Pro Vice-Chancellor Precincts at UNSW