The Business Growth Benefits of Higher Education

D. Greenaway, C. Rudd, D. Greenaway, C. Rudd

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137320698
• eBook ISBN: 9781137320704
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Strategia di business
• Index: Business

This book tackles the role of universities in driving economic growth. Their role as providers of talent, technology and new ideas is considered in the light of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. A series of expert authors consider success, opportunity and how national frameworks can be fine-tuned to deliver business success.

1

Introduction and Overview

David Greenaway and Chris D. Rudd

When the wind of change blows, some build walls others build windmills…¹

Lord Dearing left the education sector with many legacies, tangible and intangible. One of the constructs underpinning his thinking was the need to look forwards whilst looking backwards – helping the sector to evolve whilst curating the essential elements that maintain UK education providers, and particularly its universities as a byword for excellence in the global market. As the external environment heaps change upon change in and around the Higher Education sector then Dearing’s ‘Castles of the Third Age’ is an increasingly relevant metaphor.

The 2012 Dearing Conference, from which this collection of chapters is drawn, tackles one aspect of such change – a refocusing of attention on the interface between higher education, industry and commerce and the extent to which reciprocal benefits can drive business success. ‘Success’ involves certain subjectivity and a 360^o vision that includes perspectives from business, government and international providers introduces the challenge necessary to provoke creativity and transformational thinking.

Change originates from many directions. An opening up of the student recruitment market is spiced by a sense of consumerism amongst those who will pay higher fees (or strictly, higher graduate contributions). Student requests for more academic classroom hours are accompanied by demands for greater ‘employability’ skills. A relaxation of government control is tensioned by higher penalties for failure to stay within the prescribed field of play. New commitments to the campus experience are challenged by the emergence of the first, cost-free, online learning opportunities from respected universities. Greater opportunities to take delivery overseas are balanced by the appearance of the first serious international providers on UK turf. Overlaid here are the on-going consequences of the 2007 global financial crisis and a constant need to reassert the economic and social value added by a properly resourced higher education system. An increasing focus is evident on HE providers, not only as sources of graduate talent, but also as potential enablers of business competiveness and incubators of high value enterprise. Thus the very axis of the HE system begins to spin increasingly rapidly.

Large and successful institutions will adapt their structures and reallocate resources to take advantage of these new opportunities on multiple fronts. Judicious portfolio management will deliver diversity, growth and further small steps towards sustainability beyond reliance on the state system. Large universities will continue to lead a downsized public sector, driving harder on agenda such as internationalisation and creating significant business opportunities for their wider communities. Smaller institutions will have fewer bets to place and may seek to invest in narrower growth strategies. Alliances will grow in number and exert local influence as university executive boards seek to dampen the impact of fluctuating market demand and high fixed costs. Amongst any strategy for diversification and growth it is clear that enhancement of the HE-Business interface demands greater attention to opening the door on one side to sponsorship, service delivery and co-investment and on the other to talent, ideas and new technologies.

Business needs talent, technology and knowledge to prosper, irrespective of the economic cycle. Large corporates have the resources to build and sustain long term bilateral relationships with selected university partners and, in the most successful cases, work together in multiple domains to exploit graduate talent, academic expertise, international networks, intellectual property and specialist facilities. Higher education institutions (HEIs) benefit from brand association which boosts recruitment and can be a useful lever in drawing down competitive public funding. Smaller companies, especially those in the sci-tech domain, have arguably greater need of the facilities and services but fewer resources available to invest in developing relationships and long term projects.

The 2012 Wilson Review of HE-Business Engagement identifies some of the drag factors that hinder long term partnership development and the progress that has been made since the 2003 Lambert Report. Perhaps the fundamental mismatch in expectations on the two sides arises from the ill-founded assumption that the heterogeneous institution that is a university will necessarily behave as the corporate entity which seeks to engage it. Although this situation is changing it would be naïve to expect an overnight shift in academic attitudes to business engagement and innovation from within a system that has been progressively shaped by successful cycles of research assessment with no (effective) equalising tension that measures economic contribution. Nevertheless, within a system that operates with varying effectiveness there are striking examples of good practice and spectacular success including GSK’s partnerships with the Universities of Manchester and Nottingham and the extensive Rolls Royce network of University Technology Centres. Alongside this, increasing evidence of HEIs operating effectively as entrepreneurial businesses in their own right will continue to drive changing attitudes within the sector, where there is genuine engagement within the institution.

The 2012 Dearing Conference explored the business-HE corridor at a time when (to paraphrase Blezard) … the world needs innovation like never before…. Just how that innovation manifests itself and the key influences on a ‘hothouse’ environment are the subject of Professor Binks’ discussions of radical innovation – the need to temper R&D management with a degree of chaos in order to create an environment for transformational discovery. Davis considers the question of how this sits within a templated HE system and the historical context that has yielded, by and large, a standard institutional model. Witty considers how a more effective national framework might deliver greater value for business and how consortia of leading universities might be better aligned with the UK’s growth sectors. Wadams considers the existing benefits that business can lever from university partnerships and some of the historical drivers for philanthropic giving that sometimes follows. Blezard goes on to dissect the process that those discoveries which find their way to market must enter and finds fault with both sides of the University–Business interface in their attitudes to risk and expectations of return. A ‘prospecting’ approach to venture funding is proposed that turns the present model upside down. A broader view of HE-Business engagement in the context of the Creative Industries sector is taken by Paterson. The focus here is on the health and sustainability of the sector and the author examines how different interactions – supply of graduate talent, technology partnerships, business modelling and international outreach – benefit different parts of the movie supply chain. The last of those features is taken as a theme by Greenaway and Rudd in their discussion of the engagement opportunities that stem from China’s opening up and the aspirations of its new mega-corporations to modernise and internationalise their businesses. This theme is developed further by Yao and He as they discuss one means of accelerating the growth of China’s domestic talent pool and the role of foreign HEIs in delivering this.

If the 2012 Dearing Conference delivered a single message then it would be one of only partially released potential. Environmental factors have led many institutions to fling open their doors to business such as never before. The business community responding to new pressure and fresh global competition likewise seeks to get closer to next generation talent, access to new markets, products and services. In this dynamic marketplace it is the role of government agencies to ensure that these opportunities for growth are not squandered and the system remains flexible and responsive to help drive this transformation.

Notes

1. 風向轉變時,有人築牆,有人造風車, traditional Chinese proverb

Part I
International Perspectives

2

Britain 1850s: Exporting the Idea of a University to Empire

Glyn Davis

Introduction

Universities in the British tradition were not designed to engage with business. Historical legacy instead locks universities into a model that looks to the professions and to academic peers for support and validation.

This chapter explores the tension between the prevailing British tradition of a university and more recent aspirations for relevance in a changed world. It uses experience of a smaller system built exclusively on nineteenth century British practice, in Australia, to argue that path dependency, by which institutions are shaped and guided by a course set in their formative stages, is a significant impediment to broadening the university mission.

Given this volume has its origins in an education conference named to honour Lord Dearing, it is appropriate to acknowledge the great affection for Lord Dearing in higher education around the world. This is evident not just in the United Kingdom, given his association with the University of Nottingham and national tertiary education policy, but in other countries through his international activities, which included a role in establishing the first global network of universities, Universitas 21, and his role as a member of the University of Melbourne University Council.

In Melbourne, Lord Dearing delivered the 1998 Menzies Oration in Higher Education. He called for universities to rely less on government, and instead secure broader sources of funding. Yet Lord Dearing found much to praise in the past, calling for British institutions to stay true to the values of the historic university as ‘a centre for reflective thought, part of the conscience of society and, if need be, an outspoken champion of the characteristics of a democracy.’

This contribution follows Lord Dearing in looking forward through looking back. Among the many legacies of the British university is its influence abroad – specifically, the way a British conception of higher education, dating from mid-Victorian times, shaped higher education across what once was empire.

For along with a familiar cultural inheritance – parliaments and police, literature and language, courts and customs – British ideals of a university, from around 1850, formed the starting point for national systems beyond England’s shores. In Australia, in neighbouring New Zealand, in the English-speaking communities of southern Africa and Canada, the inheritance of the 1850s continues to exercise a powerful hold.

The idea of path dependency, developed in both economics and historical studies, argues for the powerful influence of founding ideas. Initial choices shape subsequent options, and university systems that began with a single, British model have continued along the path originally prescribed. Intentionally or not, the first universities founded in days of Empire set up a track that guides all future choices.

Of course, British universities have changed much since 1850, as have their counterparts across the Commonwealth. Still, there is value in comparing parallel systems now, more than 150 years from their shared origin. The tracks in Britain and Australia indicate the power of path dependency – and therefore the difficulty of refitting the university with a new mission, such as engagement with business.

Britain 1850: changing ideas of a university

The 1850s were a time of ferment in British higher education. The decade began with a Royal Commission into the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge, called in response to national movements for reform. The Commission’s report led to significant changes in Oxbridge governance and curriculum.

The Royal Commission was one small part of a wider liberal challenge to British institutions at the time. English universities, for example were widely perceived as only slowly emerging from a long period of lassitude. John Stuart Mill would tell the graduates at St Andrew’s University in 1867 that, until recently, the old English universities ‘... seemed to exist mainly for the repression of independent thought, and the chaining up of the individual intellect and conscience ...’ Yet within a few years, noted Mill (in language idiomatic of the times), these universities had been transformed into ‘the great foci of free and manly inquiry ...’

By 1850 the ancient English monopoly of Oxford and Cambridge had weakened. University College London, established in 1826 under the radical intellectual influence of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, offered university education to those excluded from Oxbridge by faith or low income. It taught in fields other than classics and ancient languages, opening up study in disciplines such as political economy, English and economics.

Fears of a ‘godless university’ saw the formation of Anglican King’s College in 1829, while Durham University received its Royal Charter in 1832. Victoria University at Manchester was added in 1880, and the University of Wales in 1893. This was major system expansion, setting a growth pattern that would continue with the civic ‘redbrick’ universities of the early twentieth century, and the new universities of the 1990s.

The 1850s saw important debates about the purpose of higher education. In 1852, John Henry Newman would publish his influential The Idea of a University, expressing a distinctive view of education. Newman’s ideal is collegiate, literary and liberal. As Sheldon Rothblatt and others suggest, Newman was profoundly opposed to the emerging secularism embodied by the University of London, and against research as an element of higher learning, as embodied by Wilhelm von Humboldt’s University of Berlin.

Over the next two decades, new voices would join the debate. Herbert Spencer published Education in 1861. In 1867 FW Farrar compiled his Essays on a Liberal Education and John Stuart Mill presented his inaugural address at St Andrew’s University. The following year Thomas Huxley would produce his essay ‘A Liberal Education, and where to find it.’

These voices spoke within a culture of novels and reports, manifestos and platforms all calling for liberal reform of the great institutions of society.

As John Henry Newman sketched his ideal institution, Charles Dickens was publishing, instalment by instalment, Bleak House, with its vivid depiction of a dysfunctional legal system. As the 1850 Royal Commission considered the state of Oxford and Cambridge, liberals pressed for restrictions on child labour, for better public sanitation, safer factories and an extension of the franchise. Within three years, British reformers in London and Melbourne would celebrate a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• 1 Introduction and Overview
• Part I International Perspectives
• Part II Supporting Strategies for Growth
• Part III Innovation
• Part IV Building Partnerships
• Index