Second Workshop on the Process of Reform of University Systems, Venice, May 2006

Second Workshop on the Process of Reform of University Systems, Venice, May 2006

University and Sustainable Economic Competitiveness: Which Link?

Round Table on ‘Issues of Competitiveness: What Role for the University, Firms and Financial Institutions?’

Introduction

1. Thank you for inviting me to take part in this Round Table. In my contribution I would like to concentrate on the role universities play in promoting competitiveness – but I also want to emphasise that the boundaries between the academic system (both higher education and research) and other systems (the economic system, the political system, the social system and so on) have become highly porous. And I mean this not simply in terms of the ease and scale of transfers across these boundaries but also in terms of the increasing fuzziness of the boundaries between these systems. In a knowledge-intensive society who can say where the academy ends and the economy begins. We live in a transgressive world which no longer possesses the regular and linear features so characteristic of modernity. As a result we need a much more integrated and holistic view of creativity and innovation (and, of course, competitiveness). It is no longer accurate, if it ever was, to see these processes in a fragmented and linear way. So, although in a sense I am ‘speaking’ for the university, it is not to the exclusion of the others.

2.In my contribution I would like to cover three main topics:

• The university as a focus of creativity and innovation (and so competitiveness) in its city, its region, its nation and (in the context of the European Higher Education Area and now the European Research Area) its continent – and maybe, because we live in age of globalisation, its world;

• More recent attempts to create more explicit connections between universities and business (and the economy) – which are significant because, in some countries (certainly in Britain), they have been defined as a kind of ‘third area’ separate from, and even in competition, with higher education and research;

• Finally I would like to say something about how both of these – the historical situation of universities as sites of creativity and innovation; and the more contemporary efforts to bring about a ‘forced marriage’ between the academy and the economy – relate to the new kind of society that is emerging, post-industrial, knowledge-intensive, globalised but also post-modern in terms of its fleeting ambiguities, beguiling transgressions, intense but ephemeral ‘styles’.

The University as a Site of Creativity and Innovation

3.First, then, universities as sites of creativity, innovation and (so) competitiveness. I believe it is important to recognise that this has always been one of the university’s most important functions:

i)The university has always been closely linked to the idea of urbanism – and cities have always been regarded as creative places. This was true in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and in more modern times. It may be that the links have become more complex – for example, between mass higher education systems and ‘world cities’ – but they continue to be vital and creative;

ii)Next universities have always been closely linked with nation-building. Indeed universities, in a recognisably modern form, emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries precisely in this context – as key institutions in the development of an industrial, bureaucratic and professional (or expert) society. The public funding of universities and their governance as public institutions are closely linked to this role (which, of course, continued and intensified after 1945 / 1960) – and this is why funding and governance have become such contested arenas, because notions of public service and private entrepreneurship are now being combined in novel (and occasionally disturbing) ways;

iii)Finally, and most recently, universities have come to seen as key agents of economic development, most especially perhaps at the regional level. Their mass production of graduates creates skills bases; their research activities promote R&D and stimulate the growth of knowledge-based enterprises; and, perhaps most crucially of all, universities create social and cultural milieux that attract, and retain, the highly skilled – the whole idea of ‘clever cities’ and ‘clever communities’.

4.In all these ways – through its links with urbanism, with nation-building and with (regional) economic development – the university has always been one of the primary sites of creativity and innovation (and so competitiveness). It is very important to recognise that these roles are not new, roles that have been ‘bolted on’ to the university’s more traditional roles. It is equally important to recognise also that these roles are not imposed on the universities from ‘outside’; they are not mandated by impatient Governments (or entrepreneurial Ministries) but are part of the fundamental ‘gene structure’ of universities.

Links between the University and Business and Industry

5.Nevertheless over the past two decades or so there have been sustained efforts in many countries to make these organic (and historic) links between the academy and the economy more explicit – and more structured. I believe there are three dimensions to these efforts:

i)The first I will label ‘linear’ – by which I mean that universities are being encouraged to ‘creep’ down the innovation chain (in other words, to extend beyond academic research into applied research and technology transfer, or even to create incubators and to establish university companies – or, in the case of teaching, to move beyond traditional academic and professional courses into continuing professional development, in-company training, executive programmes [in the case of Business Schools] and so on). Often there are financial incentives, and special Government initiatives, designed to encourage these development. In England, for example, we have a ‘Higher Education Innovation Fund’. Sometimes these efforts have been successful but sometimes less so – for two main reasons, in my view. First, universities end up trying to do too many things; they spread themselves too thinly – and, as a result, they struggle to manage increasingly disparate (and even incommensurable) activities. And the second reason is that this linear model does not necessarily to contemporary realities of how knowledge is produced and how innovation takes place (I will come back to this, if I have time);

ii)The second dimension I will label ‘hierarchical’ – or perhaps ‘diversified’ is a fairer label. By this I mean the idea that different kinds of university (or higher education institution) should have different missions. Some should concentrate on traditional forms of research and teaching, while others should concentrate on CPD or work-based learning or distance education (or e-learning) and more applied forms of research. The difficulty here is not just the traditional phenomenon of ‘academic drift’ by which less noble universities aspire to be like more noble universities (which, of course, tend to be better funded and enjoy higher social prestige); the difficulty is that it tries to over-simplify the inevitable complexity of institutional missions. We need the most research-intensive universities also to be involved in innovation and enterprise. Equally regional universities need a reasonable research profile to be interesting to industrial and business partners and a reasonable research stake in order to maintain high-quality teaching programmes. The mix between basic research and applied research also differs substantially from discipline to discipline. And, of course, that distinction itself – between pure and applied – has become deeply problematical under contemporary conditions. So – in my view – hierarchical (or diversified) models of links between universities and industry are no more convincing from linear models. We in universities are just going to have to get better at managing complexity;

iii)The third dimension I label the ‘adversarial’ – by which I mean the idea that there exists an old (and old-fashioned) academic culture which must be ‘modernised’ or ‘reformed’ if universities are to play their full part in promoting competitiveness in a modern knowledge-based economy. This is one of the drivers behind the reform of university systems across Europe – for example, greater autonomy for universities (not, of course, necessarily to promote their capacity to act as centres of independent thought – but more to give their greater operational and managerial room-for-manoeuvre, in other words to allow them to respond more flexibly to market pressures); or, to take another example, the Bologna process (which is much more about stimulating the reform of national higher education systems, and the external projection of European universities to compete better with the Americans, than it is about developing compatible course structures and the like). This ‘adversarial’ perspective is also a major driver of the efforts made by Governments to bring universities and industry closer together. My view is that this ‘adversarial’ perspective is based on misleading premises – first, that universities are inflexible, traditional, hidebound institutions; and, secondly, that, the process of innovation is well-understood and predictable (and consequently that interventions of this kind can be effective – all we need to do is to bully universities into acting more entrepreneurially).

New forms of ‘future society’; new patterns of knowledge production

6.In the final part of my presentation I would like to discuss – briefly – the emergence of new forms of society which have been received many labels (‘Knowledge society’, of course, is the most popular – but it is only one label; others are ‘risk society’, ‘audit society’, post-industrial society’ and so on). This proliferation of labels underlines, for me, a key point. It is profoundly misleading to reduce social evolution to just one form of future society – essentially a free-market, high-technology, globalised society of the kind with which we are all very familiar. Instead there are multiple forms of future society – some directly antagonistic to this (apparently) dominant form (we only need to think of different forms of fundamentalism – NOT all Islamic; or even of global terrorism). Others are characterised by various kind of ‘resistance’ to free-market high-tech globalisation – the growing power of environmental and other social movements is a good example. And, even within this (apparently) dominant form of future society there are important variations – hybrid, or Creole, forms produced by the interaction between global knowledge and local cultures and environments.

7.I do not have time today to pursue this argument in detail; all I want to emphasise is that it is misleading to imagine that the interaction, the engagement, between developed mass higher education systems and sophisticated research systems of the kind we are familiar with in the ‘West’ on the one hand and free-market high-tech globalisation on the other can be generalised, let alone universalised, as a paradigm of how links between the academy and the economy will (or must) develop. It is simply not enough to assert, as is often asserted, that contemporary (and, still more, future) society is a ‘knowledge society’; that universities are the leading producers of ‘knowledge’ (whether in form of cutting-edge research or highly skilled graduates); and – QED – universities will be the leading institutions in this society. It is much more complicated than that.

8.And I am not just talking about ‘faraway places’ or alien cultures. I am also talking about our own systems and our own societies. At the heart of the idea of a ‘knowledge society’ is the wider distribution of knowledge production – and knowledge exploitation. There are now multiple sites of knowledge production – some outside the formal university and research systems entirely; others hybrid activities and joint ventures between universities and other ‘knowledge producers’. Similarly all organisations – all successful organisations – must now be ‘knowledge’ organisations, ‘learning’ organisations but also (I would argue) ‘researching’ organisations as well. Now this can be seen in two ways – one, which is well understood, is the increasing importance of the market in brokering these multiple exchanges between knowledge producers and users; the other, less well understood, is a democratisation of these exchanges characterised by the much wider distribution of expertise (even its dissolution – at any rate, in its traditional authoritative forms; experts have never been in greater demand – but never have they been more sharply challenged). This interplay between the commodification and the democratisation of knowledge is a key phenomenon of our times – although I do not have time to explore it further today. Both are inescapable but neither can be allowed to hold unchallenged sway.

Conclusion

9.Let me now try to draw the various threads of my argument together. My initial academic discipline is – and my first love remains – history, so I hope you will forgive me offering you a historical perspective on the role universities have, do and will play in terms of promoting competitiveness (which, as I have said before several times, I see as rooted in creativity and innovation).

i)My first point is that universities have always been key elements in producing competitiveness – through their links to urbanism, to nation-building, to economic development, to modernity itself.

ii)My second point is that recent and contemporary efforts by Governments to strengthen links between universities and industry (with a view, of course, to promote competitiveness) are sometimes based on out-of-date models of innovation.

iii)And my final point is that the emergence of new social forms (firmly in the plural, because no particular form will dominate) means that universities (and other stake-holders) will have to manage a range of very complex relationships; trying to reduce them to just one or two is to do a disservice to that inevitable (and creative) complexity.

Peter Scott

KingstonUniversity

May 2006

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