These are the engines of innovation

Recently, President Emmerson Mnangagwa met university vicechancellors and college principals to foster synergies between learning institutions and communities.

AS A follow up to that call, this article reviews international experience on the role of universities in economic development by drawing lessons from a study by the United States’ Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

MIT notes that universities in over 20 countries which the research covered played a key role in supporting innovations undertaken by local communities.

The existence of universities attracted key economic resources to a particular region, including firms and educated individuals; and financiers, entrepreneurs and others seeking to exploit new business opportunities emanating from campuses. One of the most appealing features of universities is, of course, that — unlike many other participants in the local economy — they are immobile.

A university is necessarily committed to its region for the longterm. The study noted that globally, governments are exploring ways of strengthening the role of universities as agents of local and regional economic development.

In this regard, the US reached a milestone in 1980 by passing the federal Bayh-Dole Act to promote transfer of university-developed technology to industry.

Later federal initiatives included the National Science Foundation’s science and technology centres and engineering research centres; both of which made important tranches of government research-funding for the universities contingent on industry participation.

More recently, as the MIT study noted, state governments have become increasingly active in pressing public universities within their jurisdictions to contribute to local economic development.

At the same time, companies, particularly in developed countries, are working more closely with university laboratories as contributors to their research and product development activities.

Corporate interest has been stimulated by growing commercial relevance of university research in important fields like biopharmaceuticals, nanotechnology and bioengineering.

Many businesses, too, have been cutting back on in-house research and development and increasing their reliance on external sources of knowledge and technology to reduce the costs and risks of research.

In the US, industry funding for academic research has grown faster than any other funding source in recent decades.

It, however, still accounts for less than seven percent of total academic research funding (compared with 58 percent from the Federal government), and less than two percent of total industry expenditures on R&D.

For university administrators, if not for all campus residents, the new focus on what is sometimes referred to as the “third stream” mission of economic growth (to differentiate it from the traditional missions of education and research) has generally been a welcome development, in part because of its promise of new revenues at a time when traditional revenue sources are under increasing pressure.

And as the gap between academic laboratories and the marketplace has shrunk, universities, teaching hospitals and other academic units have become more adept at commercial exploitation of academic research.

Rising interest in the university’s economic development role has been fuelled by high-profile examples of successful regional economies in which the university contribution is easily identified.

The Silicon Valley, the Boston area and the region around Cambridge in the United Kingdom are examples.

Less widely-publicised, though certainly well-known to most university administrators, are cases of “blockbuster” licences on university-developed and patented technology.

Both kinds of success have helped promote what has now become a standard view of the university’s economic role, centring on technology transfer.

In addition, Stanford University, in particular, carried out ground breaking research which resulted in successful establishment of companies like Cisco, Google and Yahoo.

These companies, especially Google and Yahoo, have not only contributed to economic development in the US but also globally if one considers the impact Google is making across all sectors from a search engine perspective alone.

In these regions, the technology transfer model starts with discoveries by university researchers in their laboratories and proceeds to disclosure by the inventors, patenting by the university or the inventor and ultimately licensing of the technology, frequently to startup or early stage technology-based enterprises founded by the inventors themselves.

In Cuba and a number of Asian countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and China, university faculties have been largely configured to cover four key areas such as medicine, engineering, culture and heritage and science.

These faculties established robust synergies with the communities they serve.

As such, their curriculum is progressively reviewed to reflect the needs of their societies.

For example, in Cuba, research undertaken by universities is aimed at addressing diseases affecting communities and the nation at large.

These universities are run like business enterprises.

A special example was the National Technological University of Singapore, which, through its Faculty of Engineering, is producing spare parts for Germany’s Mercedes Benz.

This is quite ironic, isn’t it considering the fact that Germany is one of the best countries in the world when it comes to technology and innovations?

One of the major highlights of these universities is that they are research-intense; they produce research tailor-made for solving national problems (solution-driven research), innovation and enterprise development.

The role of lecturers is largely confined to research and community service as opposed to teaching, something that is rife in Africa.

As we start the journey of transforming tertiary education, it is important to take note of these lessons.

At Zimbabwe Ezekiel Guti University, we embraced the transformation agenda at our inception in 2012 under the wise counsel of our university council.

We draw our transformation agenda from our mandate, which is defined by our mission statement and motto; that is being a research-intense university which is not only locally-integrated but globally-integrated and developing entrepreneurs.