Research, Development, and Innovation in Asia Pacific Higher Education

J. Hawkins, K. Mok, J. Hawkins, K. Mok

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137457097
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation comparative

Research, Development, and Innovation in Asia Pacific Higher Education critically examines recent policies and practices adopted by governments and universities in Asia Pacific in promoting research and development, innovation, and entrepreneurial activities between the universities, industry and business. Critical reflections upon the changing relationship among these stakeholders are offered, with comparative perspectives and international insights into how universities in Asia Pacific have handled the growing pressure for top university rankings and keen competition in the knowledge-based economy.

Chapter 1

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Introduction

John N. Hawkins, Ka Ho Mok, and Deane Neubauer

Research and development (R&D) have long been key components of what have generally been called “research universities.” There is also recognition that in order to stay on the cutting edge of R&D, higher education institutions (HEIs) must increasingly strive for innovative R&D; this has important implications for the structure and governance of higher education (HE) as well as numerous other factors of HE change and transformation. Furthermore, in a manner that may be unprecedented in the period of the so-called modern university, innovation has been thrust upon the university almost as a form of social responsibility. Interestingly and overwhelmingly, due to the role the university is performing within the emergent knowledge society, innovation in the “knowledge-transfer” functions of the university—the teaching role foremost among them—has assumed increasingly greater importance (Neubauer 2011). In this book we would like to focus our attention on several of these factors including, but not limited to, the following suggestions.

There is a fundamental issue of the location of R&D in the academy structure. It is widely acknowledged that in many settings, including most members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), R&D typically resides in recognized research HEIs. Yet, in many cases, as massification has occurred and as hierarchical relationships have resulted in differential funding and prestige levels, there has been what is sometimes referred to as “mission creep.” An example in the United States is the California Master Plan, which was designed to define a clearly delineated structure that focused R&D on the University of California segment, teaching and some research on the California State University (CSU) segment, and teaching and open access on the Community College segment. For a variety of socioeconomic reasons (not the least of which is the opportunity of overhead funding from external research grants), faculty in the CSU segment have been “creeping” toward replicating the R&D functions of the University of California segment, thus blurring the boundaries between the research functions of the system. Similar forces are present in newer systems in Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea to name just five Asia Pacific settings. These forces have a significant impact on the organization, planning, and governance of HE with respect to R&D and the emphasis on innovation (Hawkins and Jacob 2011).

A related issue of “location” relates to the so-called triple helix of university, industry, and government relations. In recent years, a number of concepts have been proposed for modeling the transformation processes of this three-way interaction. Adding the notion of innovation requires the blurring of boundaries between them and suggests different modes for the production of new knowledge. Knowledge flows are recursive rather than linear, and suggest many new and novel ways to think about R&D and the knowledge revolution. While typically discussed with respect to the sciences, this model has equal relevance for all areas of knowledge production including the social sciences and humanities (e.g., the nature and impacts of health policy) even though these have been much less self-consciously studied as such. Some of the chapters in this volume attempt to revisit the triple helix model in conceptualizing state-enterprise-university relations. Chan and Mok’s chapter critically reviews how universities in Taiwan have engaged with the industry and enterprises for promoting innovation and knowledge-transfer activities. When exploring deeper university-enterprise cooperation, Chan and Mok have found that the existing triple helix model has actually missed one important dimension—the growing importance of the civil society or local community in promoting innovation, community-based business, and community development when deepening their cooperation with universities (see Chan and Mok in this volume). Meanwhile, scholars and researchers gathered at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, in July 2014 to discuss social policy responses and social innovation focusing on Asia, with one of the prominent themes being “bringing the society” back. When reflecting upon the changing role of the state in social-welfare provision and social policy design, especially in the state-alone mode, many Asian governments have found it difficult to sustain the growing expenditure on social welfare/social policy. It is in this context that social enterprises and community-based enterprises are strongly encouraged to work with the university sector for translating local knowledge into commercialized products in the market place.

Another fundamental issue has to do with the historical distribution of R&D in HE, with Europe and North America having a head start and HEIs in other emerging economies developing capacity later and forging links in a variety of ways with leading universities in those settings. There are various implications for this, especially in the increasingly globalized environment, in areas such as cross-border research and the migration of intellectual talent (the so-called brain-train); massification of academic research, basic research, academic research, and new public management; rise of private funding; internationalization of academic research; new social contracts for research; the role of new developments in technology; emerging “new giants” such as India and China (as members of the BRICs); the role of regionalization in R&D and innovation (e.g., the Bologna process in Europe and various new Asian and Pacific regional organizations); the link between R&D and innovation and the burgeoning quality assurance and accreditation movements especially on the international level; the financing of R&D; and the increasingly blurred role between the public and private sectors and their impact on R&D and innovation. The entire landscape of HE, with its various institutional structures and functions has been enormously impacted by the role of emergent private sector HEIs, many of them acting cross-nationally, some of which are enrolling hundreds of thousands at a time, gaining significant returns on capital, and impacting in major ways the status of traditional HEIs within their accustomed national settings (Hawkins 2011).

These issues represent broad, regional, and global concerns. Focusing on the HEIs and their responses to these broader forces leads to more specific concerns such as the purpose and functions of R&D and innovation in the academy and how dramatically changed funding patterns have impacted the organization of R&D and innovation. In many recognized research institutions, there has been a decreasing reliance on state/government funding for R&D and an increase in the role of private funding from the corporate sector in order to mount the kind of research necessary to remain competitive. This has implications for the basic research and applied research shares of the R&D effort, as well as academic autonomy and innovation. There are additional implications for the social returns to HE from this changed research landscape such as the relationship between employment and R&D investment that underpins the “high skills” strategy of many governments and HEIs in the Asian Pacific region. It is here that the innovative aspects of private sector (often proprietary) HE are being most experienced. At the institutional level this impacts the relationship between the postgraduate education experience and training and the labor market—the classic “alignment” issue.

The broad area of internationalization and the role of globalization in HE within the context of competition and rankings have contributed to an environment in which R&D and innovation are inextricably linked between institutions within the Asia Pacific region and between it and other global settings. These linkages are increasingly being recognized by HE leaders in the United States and Asia as well as Europe, even as others seek to critique and clarify such concepts as globalization and internationalization. It is now clear that breakthrough discoveries will also occur in many parts of the Asia Pacific region and many HEIs in the United States and elsewhere are seeking active partnerships and collaborative arrangements in order to participate in these new ventures. One aspect of this development may be a rethinking of how intellectual property regimes within countries are distributed between HEIs and other sources of knowledge innovation. Overall, how these linkages develop and enhance R&D and innovation in cross-regional settings is a critical question that we hope some of the chapters in this volume will address.

The quest for new approaches to R&D, entrepreneurship, and innovation has also had a significant impact on HE governance. In the Asian Pacific region and in the United States, HEIs have long incorporated offices and centers for R&D within their governing structures. More recently there have been more proactive efforts to establish new administrative units to focus on innovation as it relates to more traditional R&D. Chief Innovation Officers have been appointed in many HEIs in the region, usually attached to schools and colleges where R&D is typically performed (e.g., Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics [STEM] areas, medical schools, engineering schools, etc.). This represents a new administrative input into the governance architecture of HE and one that has been little studied regarding its impact and effectiveness. As for the transnational mass-scale proprietary HEIs, the governance relationship has been fundamentally restructured as a result of “unbundling” traditional faculty relationships and roles while transforming the faculty role within the institution to that of a focused, specialized, contract employee. Decisions typically made within traditional HEI structures as part of the governance structure are increasingly made within a corporate management framework.

There is a realization that dependence on state sources of funding and support are not likely to meet the pressing demands from students and parents in Asia for high-quality education. Therefore, it is not surprising to see that Asian governments have adopted policies to encourage the private sector to get involved in developing an education market, and public universities are being strongly encouraged to engage with industry and business for deep cooperation. In this way, states want to see more synergy between the university and enterprise for promoting innovation, knowledge-transfer, and entrepreneurial activities of different kinds (Mok 2013a; 2015; Chan and Mok in this volume). Mok’s recent comparative study related to university-enterprise cooperation in selected East Asian economies such as Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong has clearly shown a growing regional trend in Asia to foster stronger and closer relationships between the university sector and industry and business. The development of these linkages has not only diversified economic activities providing a strong impetus to the development of new economic pillars in South Korea and Singapore along with an integrated pattern of innovation and creativity but has also affected the way university is managed and its performance measured (Mok 2012). Surveys and field interviews were conducted by Mok in examining how academics assess and evaluate the call for deeper university-enterprise cooperation in East Asia and how this has clearly revealed the diverse views and opinions expressed by faculty members from different academic disciplines. Predictably engineering and business sectors show more support for these efforts, while humanities and social sciences colleagues have criticized HE for being run as commercial companies in which education ideals are jeopardized (Mok 2013b; Mok and Nelson 2013). The call for closer relationship between university-industry-business has no doubt made academics more critical of the imposed forms of privatization, marketization, and commercialization of HE (Turner and Huuseyin 2014).

Thus we see the following topics, among others, addressed by contributors to the book, seeing them primarily as hypotheses to be sharpened and/or revised.

• Massification of HE has resulted in a problem as to where R&D and its innovative mission should reside in HE systems. Systems in the past have sought to lodge R&D in discrete kinds of institutions and restrict it from others (e.g., the California Master Plan) but this approach has eroded as non-research-oriented HEIs have sought to move up, resulting in a form of mission creep.

• Government policies that promote research and innovation are (a) on the increase, (b) extend to and invite new relationships especially among private sector actors (but not exclusively), (c) are occasioning new ways of linking HEIs to the research and innovation activities of society, with (d) increasingly novel ways of both financing and recovering the benefits of research and innovation (including intellectual property rights).

• University responses to university-industry-business cooperation are becoming more common among HEIs in all Asian countries (if highly differentiated) with strong implications for university governance structures and relations. Overall, research is being repositioned within university structures with a range of impacts that include re-statusing of faculty and reconsideration of the kinds of skills and capabilities that both undergraduates and graduates should possess. As a general rule the HEIs are subject to a wide range of pressures to assure that graduates have skills deemed necessary by national, regional, and global economies.

• Regarding the mission of the university, Asian university perspectives are essential here. As HEIs continue to develop across the broad range of demographic, societal, and economic transitions characteristic of Asian societies, universities are being looked upon as focused sources of retention and articulation of those elements within such societies that “make them Asian.” This extends to the understanding of the university itself as an institution and its mission to embody and to continue developing Asian perspectives.

• University strategies in enhancing research capacity are becoming both more intense and more comprehensive as the range of university-related research grows. Such efforts extend from developing and sustaining research activities within HEIs, previously known almost exclusively for their teaching role, to developing curricula that align the university with major issues within the world at large (e.g., population growth and entailments, societal aging, technology transformations, climate change, global financial issues, globalization, etc.).

• Within this environment of intense concentration on R&D and innovation, impacts on university governance are large as new activities come to be pursued within universities that require novel approaches and tend to “privilege” other parts of the institution than those that gave rise historically to governance structures.

All of the above constitute what has been called a dominant paradigm in HE. However, with a new emphasis on innovation and change, there is movement in some new directions that hold much promise for the future (Hawkins 2007). The book contains two large clusters of chapters. One focused on “policy implications for shifting research capacity and development,” and the other on “entrepreneurship, innovation, and development in the research domain.” Taken together the chapters that make up these two parts do so in an eclectic manner utilizing multidisciplinary approaches, case study examples, policy analysis, and the historical context in which such changes are taking place. It is our hope that the diversity in approaches to these large and challenging issues will stimulate further discussion of the future development of HE’s major mission: R&D and innovation.

References

Hawkins, J. N. 2007. “The Intractable Dominant Educational Paradigm.” In Changing Education: Leadership, Innovation, and Development in a Globalizing Asia Pacific, edited by P. D. Hershock, M. Mason, and J. N. Hawkins, 137–162. Hong Kong: Springer Press.

———. 2011. “The Transformation of Research in the Knowledge Society: The U.S. Experience.” In The Emergent Knowledge Society and the Future of Higher Education: Asian Perspectives, edited by D. N. Neubauer, 26–41. London: Routledge.

Hawkins, J. N., and W. James Jacob. 2011. Policy Debates in Comparative, International and Development Education. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Mok, K. H. 2012. “The Quest for Innovation and Entrepreneurship: The Changing Role of University in East Asia.” Globalization, Education & Society 10 (3) September: 317–336.

———. 2013a. The Quest for Entrepreneurial Universities in East Asia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

———. 2013b. “The Quest for an Entrepreneurial University in East Asia: Impact on Academics and Administrators in Higher Education.” Asia Pacific Education Review 14 (1): 11–22.

———. 2015. “The Quest for Global Competitiveness: Promotion of Innovation and Entrepreneurial Universities in Singapore.” Higher Education Policy 28 (1): 91–106.

Mok, K. H., and A. Nelson. 2013. “The Changing Roles of Academics and Administrators in Times of Uncertainty.” Asia Pacific E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Introduction
• Part I   Policy Implications for Shifting Research Capacity and Development
• Part II   Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Development in the Research Domain
• Contributors Biographies
• Index