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

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.