How do education, research and innovation interact in universities?

On November 10^th, 2015 Richard Scott, the policy analyst at the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (OECD), gave a lecture about the role of higher education institutions (HEIs) in “the knowledge triangle” to the 2^nd year students of the Master’s Programme “Governance of Science, Technology and Innovation”, HSE.

At the beginning of the presentation, Richard talked about the diversity of HEIs in different countries. Universities vary significantly depending on subjects and fields of Science being studied and taught, types of funding (whether it is financed by the government or is a private organization) and roles they fulfill (education, research and/or consultancy). HEIs are inherently tied to historical and cultural factors, the structure of country’s economy, public and private infrastructure, connection with other organizations as well as framework conditions. Diversity and path dependency of universities make them unique in terms of their model. Therefore, it is almost impossible to repeat foreign experience regardless of it being successful or not. However, it is important to study good examples of university models for a possible adaptation.

Richard described several major roles that universities fulfill apart from education. First, they provide fundamental knowledge that is a core factor for the development of science. Second, universities create the environment that motivates the disclosure and publication of results and methods due to various policy measures (e.g. assessment of a researcher’s performance by the number of publications, patents in highly valued journals, etc.), in contrast to R&D conducted in the private sector. Then, HEIs also play a role of a source of regional expertise and potential spillovers due to high interdisciplinarity of studies. Finally, universities recognize the role of industrial innovation and may potentially serve as the bridges between science and industries.

Richard mentioned that the role and importance of HEIs is changing over the time. It became important what kind of funding modes should be provided to the HEIs. However, at the same time, getting money became a more complicated task due to the shift from block to competitive funding based on the university performance. Development of information and communication technology (ICT) brought even more attention to HEIs, as universities gained a possibility to teach people distantly. Competition also became much bigger in terms of students and researchers: performance assessment forced HEIs to hunt for researchers with good portfolios and distant learning opened new opportunities for globalization of education.

In Richard’s opinion, HEIs serve as the best platform to attract and educate students in order to make them highly skilled researchers. Knowledge is constantly being generated and diffused, as research and education are closely linked in universities. All of this leads to researchers’ critical thinking, creation and diffusion of innovation. The distribution of university activities between people, community and a private sector may vary, though a commercial part is usually small. As the study on the UK universities performance showed, commercial activities account for a small part of what universities do in the UK. For example, only 5% are involved in licence research, 4% — in patenting, 4% — in spin-out business. At the same time, the UK universities implement important activities for knowledge transfer, such as lectures for community (38%), informal advice (57%), school projects (30%). Richard Scott noted that measuring such activities is very difficult except for commercialisation where data on patents, spin-offs, etc. is available. The aim of such studies is to develop respective policies.

Richard also presented two of the main models for HEIs that affect their activities: the knowledge triangle and “smart specialization”. “Smart specialization” exploits framework conditions to optimize universities’ activities, for example, for the needs of a region and its development (teaching professions in high demand for the benefit or the region and so on). On the other hand, the knowledge triangle combines research, education and innovation meaning that HEIs play a role of the bridge.

Richard stated several benefits of the knowledge triangle. First, students take the most relevant knowledge from professors and researchers performing novel studies and trying to solve existing challenges. Second, students become part of the research bringing new skills and capacities. Finally, PhD students and HEI graduates may continue in private sectors with acquired knowledge leading to spillovers and potential innovation. Richard also named several downsides: too much competition for budget and commercialization attempts distract researchers from their studies, and the reputation of HEIs sometimes plays a bigger role than the actual performance. 

At the end of his lecture, Mr. Scott moved to the proposal of the research he is participating in as a member of the OECD within the framework of knowledge triangle studies. The research is investigating two aspects: the potential of re-positioning of universities and the patterns of indicators changes. In particular, the study analyses the concentration of research, education, innovation in the USA, the roles that universities play in the overall country’s performance and whether the simultaneous education, innovation and research complement each other in performing university. For this purpose, the US data consisting of 3 samples was considered.

The preliminary results showed that larger universities are more efficient, but the staff/students ratio also increases with the size of universities, and further research on these topics could provide more evidence on other indicators and their relationship. Another interesting idea suggested for this research purposes is to find the production functions for universities and to study what and how they can maximize to achieve their goals. Before the results of the research are finally obtained, all these questions remain worth thinking of.

Prepared by:
Pavel Bakhtin, Elena Buslaeva, Alina Kadyrova, Maya Suvorova.

 

Other students' feedback on the lecture.

Ozan GÜLER:

"During his presentation, it was possible to discuss the trends affecting the role of HEIs within the knowledge triangle, some of which are financial pressure, global competition between both students and researchers, changing funding structure of HEIs (from block to competitive funding). Because of his role in the OECD organization, many graphs were -presented by him as expected".

 

Kadyrova Alina:
"Mr. Scott presented the results of the current OECD research which became a very interesting and valuable addition to the theoretic material. Overall, the lecture given by the professional who currently works with the knowledge triangle concept on the real data was useful for all students regardless of their scientific interests".

 

Ekaterina Tertyshnaya:

"It was a fascinating and useful lecture for all of us. It helped to deepen our knowledge and understanding of the HEI role in the innovation system and gave us an opportunity to be actively involved into the discussion with a leading expert in the field of educational research and innovation".