The objective of this doctoral thesis is to facilitate analyses of the role of universities and scientific research in regional development. To this end, the thesis investigates how the practical relevance of scientific knowledge emerges. Instead of adopting the dominating assumption in the literature, namely that scientific knowledge becomes exploitable in university-industry relationships, the thesis approaches the question of practical relevance from three complementary perspectives: that of the regional development process, the innovation process, and the scientific knowledge creation process. The empirical cases chosen to exemplify such processes have their origins in the University of Turku, Finland, and they all relate to efforts to commercialize knowledge that has been created in this university context.

The thesis is a compiled work, consisting of an introductory essay and four research papers, one theoretical and three empirical ones. Whereas the theoretical research paper builds on literature-based conceptual analysis and development, the three empirical studies employ different forms of process analysis. In the theoretical paper, the focus is on the nature of scientific knowledge. In the empirical studies, the focus is on people who use scientific research to accomplish something in practice. These actors are trying to realize their interests while circumstances, resources, and technologies are setting limits to their possibilities to do so. It is assumed that the practical relevance of science forms in such processes.

The thesis makes three main contributions to prior research. First, it confirms that the regional conditions for creating practically relevant scientific knowledge originally emerge through self-organized networks, rather than through top-down governed entrepreneurial university initiatives. An additional finding is that the founding process of the university does not appear to have as strong an effect on later regional development processes as prior research indicates. Second, the thesis demonstrates the uncertain and ambiguous nature of knowledge creation during a radical innovation process and argues that the subsequent management challenges are usually not adequately taken into account in research on regional science-based innovative activity. Third, the thesis presents a novel typology of scientific knowledge, which provides a more clearly defined account of research-based knowledge and knowing than the more generic typologies of knowledge previously employed in this research context. The resulting concepts enable studying the processes in which knowledge is combined into innovations of various degrees of novelty.