From crisis to resilient coexistence: adaptive global competence of Asian universities

Purpose This research examines how Asian universities, especially those in China and South Korea, can respond to interconnected crises such as climate change, demographic aging and migration. Existing studies have explored higher education resilience, global competence and Helix-based innovation, but they often focus on short-term crisis response, student-level competence or stakeholder collaboration without explaining how universities develop long-term adaptive capacity. To address this gap, this study integrates the Quintuple Helix Model with complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory to examine how universities move from traditional institutional structures toward collaborative hubs that foster resilience and adaptive global competence. Design/methodology/approach This research adopts a comparative qualitative design that first reviews 16 QS Top 200 universities in mainland China and South Korea, examining four mechanisms at a broad regional level, and then conducts a focused documentary and structured web content analysis of Zhejiang University (ZJU) in China and Hanyang University (HYU) in South Korea through the Adaptive Quintuple Helix framework. Featured projects from both universities and related crisis-coping activities are examined through four adaptive mechanisms/competencies of technical mediation, cultural translation, entrepreneurship and trust to navigate the overlapping social and environmental challenges. Findings The research finds that those four adaptive mechanisms or competencies are publicly visible and institutionalized through different organizational forms and documentary signals rather than in a uniform way. In the focused case comparison, ZJU appears more visibly large-scale, policy-aligned and research-intensive, while HYU appears more socially embedded, community-facing and applied, suggesting two distinct adaptive pathways through which universities respond to aging, climate and mobility-related pressures. Research limitations/implications Relying on publicly available documentary materials, the research captures visible institutional patterns rather than direct evidence of implementation quality, stakeholder experiences or long-term societal impacts. The focused comparison of ZJU and HYU, therefore, offers analytical depth but limited generalizability beyond similarly resourced universities. Future research can extend the framework through broader cross-national samples, longitudinal designs and interview- or survey-based evidence to test how these publicly documented adaptive pathways operate in practice. Originality/value This research contributes by combining the Quintuple Helix Model with CAS theory and operationalizing it, showing that Asian universities do not display crisis-response capacity in a uniform way, but rather through distinct, publicly documented adaptive pathways shaped by different configurations of coordination, engagement and environmental orientation.