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1/ Work is making me think a lot more about how producers of research (mostly unis) transfer knowledge into the economy in a way that drives economic growth and whether/how that changes based on economic geography.
2/ Pretty much all the models on tech transfer come from developed economies and moreover tend to describe transfers as they occur in large dense urban centres. This is of limited use to people everyone else where these conditions do not exist.
3/ The big issue for me is: what is an appropriate sci/tech strategy in an economic periphery? Doesn't matter where it is: central Africa, Northern Manitoba, Eastern Poland - If the gap between uni science and local business capacity is too wide, there are going to be mismatches.
4/ Because science is so universal and transmissible, it does not take that much time/money/talent to get a centre close enough to the scientific/technology frontier to start making contributions to global knowledge in most fields. Barriers to entry are not so high.
5/ From an academic perspective, that's great. The more the merrier! Better training opportunities, better science, it's all good. But governments, not unreasonably, want to see universities as economic catalysts of some kind (indeed unis often sell themselves as such).
6/ But catalysts need reactants. If you're doing cutting edge work & there is no one in the community to take advantage of it, what is the likelihood of uptake? I'm not just talking about basic research here: there's lots of applied or use-inspired research that has this problem.
7/ Let's say you fund some medical research centres in Africa. They might do tons of good research. But if there are no pharma companies doing R&D in Africa, how does that work translate into autonomous, indigenous economic growth?
8/ Or say you are some kind of maritime/oceans science group. You can be doing work which is at the absolute cutting edge of science, but if your local fishing industry is a decade behind industry leaders in technology, will they even be able to use your science?
9/ The point is that in some ways it is possible (maybe even quite common) for a university to get too far ahead of the local economy to fulfill a tech transfer/economic catalyst mission. But what is to be done? Both the econ lit and the HE lit are quite silent on this.
10/ I think the default university reaction is "build it and they will come", but I have my doubts about that. Outside of China, there are not a lot of good examples of big investments in HE/research leading to take-off growth in lagging economic areas.
11/ but on the other hand, what other strategies are there? Ask the universities to do less? Ask them to concentrate further away from the technological frontier? That doesn't sound like a winning strategy either.
12/ I don't have an obvious solution here, but it seems to me whatever the answer is, it will lie in finding ways to increase the knowledge-intensity of local industry. There is a university/college role to play here, but it won't be through traditional tech transfer mechanisms.
13/ It'll be something much closer to "capacity building" - much more a human capital thing than an intellectual capital thing.
It takes two to tango. Unis need dance partners in the community in order maximize impact. If they don't have any, they'll need to grow their own.
It takes two to tango. Unis need dance partners in the community in order maximize impact. If they don't have any, they'll need to grow their own.
