|
January 28, 2008
Michael Gibbons, director of science and technology policy research at Britain's Sussex University, has said universities must abandon their centuries-old model of linear knowledge transfer and instead open their doors and minds to knowledge exchange with competitors and students:
Universities need to flick their switches from "transmit" to "receive" in order to adapt to new patterns of knowledge transfer.The accent in universities has always been that they provide the front end of the chain, the bright ideas that other people pick up and take through the industrial system and out to the marketplace to you and me.University people, left to themselves, always want to go back to first principles" of identifying a problem and solving it. (Yet) so many of the ideas that are going to make their way into (the innovation system) have been discovered by someone else. Universities need to develop a cadre of people who are good at finding out what already exists and using that in the innovation process. If someone has already done it, you might as well move on.
A knowledge exchange. That opens the door to a greater flow of knowledge between the university and the public sphere and civil society and a wider conversation about ideas. That would change the way the universities are always on transmit, they are never on receive.
Gibbons then gives a model of how this might be done:
I see the next generation of university/graduate employees as being Linux-type people: they find their problems in a way that is open-ended and rigorously honest. To be able to participate in the process, you have to join a community. If you are sufficiently able to keep up, you are kept in the community. You are at the leading edge of what you know, so your ability to make use of the stuff that you are learning depends on how clever you are. If you try to cheat or take something away, they cut you off.
The conventional understanding of innovation would need to be broadened. The standard innovation policies emphasis the junction between industry and commercial ideas. It is assumed there will continue to be researchers with creative imaginations who produce ideas and policy sets out to ensure that a greater proportion of these ideas can be commercialised and that industry supports them.
Simon Marginson observes:
Today's innovation policies had their genesis in the Thatcher government in Britain in the second half of the 1980s. Her government developed financial incentives and product formats in research, designed to harness university work more closely to industry. In their famous Mode 1-Mode 2 model Michael Gibbons and collaborators argued that the future belonged to university science driven externally by industry, markets and government. The argument was influential, underpinning instrumentalist approaches to research policy in many countries.
So there would need to be a restoration of public benefit as one of the primary objectives of innovation and research; public benefit widely understood to embrace the fostering of creativity: the generation of breakthrough ideas.
This takes us to Richard Florida's argument about the "creative economy".which examines the factors that attract highly creative people to particular places in numbers and diversity, and the freedom they need to produce brilliant ideas and talk about them in an engaging manner. It is about their interactions, for example between creative people in the sciences and the arts. It is about programs and reward systems that attract and hold top-flight people and emerging stars, and more effectively utilising global networks.
|
