How to build an entrepreneurial university
Universities and industry have a lot to learn from one another – and partnerships between the two can be mutually beneficial while especially serving the university’s entrepreneurial students.
It can be difficult to get these partnerships right, but with a structured collaborative framework on the part of the university, an eye to common values, flexibility and smart programmes for budding start-ups, these partnerships can benefit all involved.
Here’s how universities can better partner with industry and become more entrepreneurial.
Sharpening the university’s structures for collaboration with industry
Industry partners do not always find it easy to collaborate with universities. The partners might expect a streamlined process, but collaboration is often siloed, requiring partners to interact with different parts of the institution.
Nurturing a university culture for industry collaboration must be an institutional priority. Robert Rybnicek and Roland Königsgruber recently published a meta-analysis of the literature on factors facilitating university-industry collaboration, in which they identified structure and staff as critical factors affecting the success of partnerships.
Universities can improve collaboration by creating a transparent framework for industry partnerships. This includes appointing a dedicated partnership facilitator to help business leaders understand the processes and sequences of collaboration within the university and navigate transitions. Such a counterpart allows the university to take the lead on the collaboration in a structured way.
The evolution of university-industry collaboration in the UK is a noteworthy example. With more research funding to support collaborative programmes, the Innovative Manufacturing Initiative led to a host of new research-industry collaborations. But these endeavours exposed the need for greater capacity of industry to absorb leading research results. The most recent UK policy attempts to measure the impact universities have on society and the economy, with increased emphasis on knowledge transfer through the development of a new indicator, the Knowledge Excellence Framework.
Some universities, such as Imperial College London, have always fostered deep partnerships with industry. Imperial College London currently collaborates with more than 500 technology partners, contributing significantly to its core research income. These relationships and how they’re management within universities continue to evolve, as it’s recognized they bring multiple benefits beyond core research collaboration – including better access to and collaboration with talented students and staff, support for start-ups through corporate venture capital and corporate acceleration, engagement in local community activities and convening public events and raising awareness of the long-term importance of science, engineering, medicine and the arts. Such collaborations have led to more sophisticated mechanisms within universities to work across traditional silos.
Συνέχεια ανάγνωσης εδώ: www.weforum.org
