Pósfainé Bakota, É. (2014). Territorial peculiarities of the network of consultation centers helping the spread of the Engineering IT university program. Modern Geográfia, 9(1), 29–39.
The aim of this article is to demonstrate and verify that the formation and role of consultation centers developed as a result of the diffusion of innovation after the emergence of the new “educational idea” of the DGC, are factors of decisive importance in the spatial spread of IT engineer knowledge. The research revealed that IT engineer knowledge streamed to other regions of the Carpathian Basin through connections projecting out of the territory of the residence of the college, “bridges”, “clusterings” and consultation centers. It was verified during the investigation of the role of the consultation centers that it represented the forming of a transmitting network, to which the diffusion processes of innovation can be locally attributed. It can be stated that there was a direct correlation, characteristic to the whole life cycle of diffusion of the IT engineer course, between the number of consultation centers and the number of adaptors. Since the recess of innovation following the saturation phase of diffusion may be as much linked to the decreasing number of consultation centers as to the decreasing number of students.
Keywords: consultation center; engineer computer science major; knowledge flow, spatial structure