Although HEIs still enjoy a special reputation, it is undeniable that a number of pressures and expectations from societies require them to evolve and adapt to a reality that calls them to solve the crucial problems we are facing. Promoting the exploitation of research knowledge and capitalising on the human talents they cultivate is one of them.
INTRO
As many commentators stated in the past 15 years (e.g. Christensen and Eyring 2011; Galloway 2020) the Universities are facing several challenges for many reasons:
- digital technologies somehow made the production and distribution of contents (the gist of education) dispersed and open to a variety of subjects.
- research is not confined within the boundaries of HEIs: private research institutions, consultancies and many other organisations possess the competence and access to data that make them compete with universities in the production of innovative knowledge.
- public funding of research and education is under pressure in many countries.
ARGUMENT
The expression “entrepreneurial university” has been around for quite a while now (Advancing the Entrepreneurial University, OECD). Despite that, governments and public opinion all over the world are looking at HEIs as places wherein knowledge, matured in basic research and taught to young talents, needs to be rapidly converted into practical solutions for daunting problems, such as inequality, pollution, social advancement, health.
The avenues to leave a mark on society are numerous: creating spin-off companies from research carried out by researchers, fostering the birth and growth of student startups, licensing innovative knowledge to allow firms to finalize the exploration of researchers in the form of novel artifacts. Governments all over Europe are imposing an agenda wherein the performance of universities is assessed on the basis of their actual “impact” as it happens for the UK REF exercise or the Italian VQR evaluation exercise, wherein the third mission of universities is scrutinized and assessed.
Time4UNIchange tries to address the needs of HEIs to adequately respond to the challenge posed by the “entrepreneurial agenda” for universities. In the first period of the project, the partners analysed the factors that enable or hinder the external engagement, by focusing on the factors that researchers perceive as conducive to an evolution of their profession, mixing the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of curiosity and the propensity to put their knowledge to the benefit of societies and economies.
The focus group carried out by the team in Venice brought out some insights also found in other universities. First, researchers pointed to the gap between the incentives that govern their careers, entirely focused on their scientific productivity, that make it counterproductive to focus on anything that is not conducive to a publication. Given the increasing competition for tenured positions, younger generations of scholars are less likely than their older peers to engage in third mission activities. Second, the incentives: monetary incentives are not perceived as paramount in dictating the researchers’ will to engage in entrepreneurial activities. Rather, the opportunity to pursue “personalized” career paths, to juggle between periods where basic research is the crucial activity of a researcher and others where creatively translating the research results can be done is deemed as fundamental.
CONCLUSION
What emerged in this first project phase through the focus groups and interviews is a composite set of challenges that call universities to revisit some of their operating logics and organizational settings.
Each partner of T4UC focused on different aspects of the external engagement and entrepreneurial conundrum for universities and will be the basis upon which the partnership will elaborate novel proposals for universities to increase their entrepreneurial potential.
Stay in touch to read about other results in our first e-zine that will be soon available on our project website.