Here’s one answer. According to the authors, Geoffrey Boulton and Colin Lucas, ‘It is wrong, in our view, to expect (to use language from the beginning of this paper) that universities will be dynamos of growth and huge generators of wealth, leading to economic prosperity and enhanced quality of life on anything like the scale that is implicit in such language. In a European context, where governments are principal funders of universities, the assumption is that they are a lever which, when pulled, will gush forth the tangible effects of economic prosperity into which public money has been transformed. In reality, universities can only be one part of the process of producing a successful knowledge economy.’