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Mario Rotondi, professeur italien de droit privé et de droit commercial, pionnier du droit industriel et de la comparaison juridique, était un « juriste voyageur ». Il se situait au centre d’un réseau académique international voué à la promotion de travaux scientifiques et de réformes législatives dans le domaine du droit comparé. Le voyage est au cœur de ses innombrables initiatives. À partir de ses missions dans les universités de l’Amérique du Sud, dont ses correspondances rendent compte, la présente étude entend explorer ses liens professionnels, ses objectifs et l’impact de ses projets. Mario Rotondi was an Italian professor of law and a “travelling jurist”. He ventured into the contiguous areas of private and commercial law, engaged with the areas of industrial law and comparative law. His distinguishing feature was his academic cooperation with foreign scholars in the field of comparative law. The issue of travel is a common thread throughout his various initiatives, both academic, and of legal reform. This paper aims to cast some light on his missions to South American universities, on the goals that inspired him and on the projects that animated these goals.

Recent work on Region Innovation Systems (RIS) has emphasised the importance of universities. Until recently, however, related insights into the dynamics of this relationship in respect of the specific role of the science park have been limited. This paper presents a systematic review identifying the key roles of each actor in relation to innovation. We link the dynamic roles performed by the university between science parks and the RIS. Our results enable us to identify how the key activities performed by the university change during its interrelations within the RIS and with the science park. Our analysis of the literature distinguishes between three sets of relationships through which the university plays differing roles: RIS-university, RIS-university-science park, and university-science park. Respectively, the University’s relationships between these different RIS actors focuses on: resource sharing, brokerage, and commercialisation-exploitation. Secondly, we find that within each of these relationship types the university can perform three types of roles: on knowledge co-creation, acting as conduit, and inter-organisational relationship building. Distinguishing between these differing relationships and roles enables us to identify a total of nine dynamic roles performed by the University, which include: provision of information, channels of communication, infrastructure, regional networking, building research collaboration, acting as knowledge intermediaries, economic development, technological change and commercialisation processes, and start up creation and commercialisation. The review identifies several gaps in the literature in need of further research, and suggests that university relationships with RIS, interlinked with those between the university and science park itself, are important factors affecting science park innovation performance.