Inside the market-friendly university

Study at Keele’s Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine.

The fact is that public ownership has bred a civil service, job for life, anti-risk outlook that stifles innovative forces at the outset.

Most universities pay at least lip service to being part of the knowledge economy and many make large claims for their innovativeness. But innovation cannot be a bolt-on, driven solely by the technology transfer office, it requires an outward-facing, business-friendly, professional and systematic approach. This calls for root and branch reforms.

One UK university – Keele, in Staffordshire – has faced up to bleating academics and undertaken a thorough restructuring that aims to make its research more relevant and market driven. It has done this by reforming all its separate departments across arts, humanities, science and medicine into seven multidisciplinary research institutes.

These institutes manage all the research funds that the university receives. Rather than being under the “ownership” of an individual scientist, all grant money is applied for, and disbursed by, a specialist team of administrators at the core of each institute. Each of the seven has its own research director, overseeing all the work that is carried out.

Meanwhile, the university’s teaching responsibilities have been parcelled into 13 teaching schools.

Carrot and stick

The approach combines carrot and stick. All staff who are active in research are members of an institute and get a proportionate reduction in their teaching duties, while those who are not, remain in their departments and carry on teaching.

The vice chancellor of the university, Janet Finch, told Science|Business. “This is about ensuring all research is managed and supported properly. We have dedicated administrative staff who submit grant applications and manage the funding and dedicated research leadership.”

The research institutes are in primary care and health sciences; science and technology in medicine; environment, physical sciences and applied mathematics; public policy and management; life course studies;law, politics and justice; and humanities.

The range of subjects demonstrates another facet of innovation – that it is not the sole province of the sciences. Innovation in the sensitive handling of an ageing population is not limited to new medical treatments, but involves a whole range of social and care issues as well.

Keele’s multidisciplinary approach to ageing draws in research from social science, medical and health disciplines, and links to local primary care providers who are supporting the translation of findings into clinical practice.

Centre of excellence

Similarly, within the research Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine, Keele has European funding to set up a Centre of Excellence in Tissue Engineering. This pulls together research on the cellular mechanisms behind bone and cartilage growth, with engineering skills and an understanding of the environment into which tissue-engineered constructs will be implanted. The centre is located on the site of the local hospital and includes good manufacturing practice facilities for producing material for clinical trials.

“The seven research institutes all have an enterprise brief,” said Finch. “It is their duty to share their research. We aim to push back the frontiers of knowledge as well as attracting income and encouraging enterprise.”  

Not surprisingly, this reform has not gone down well in all quarters, but Finch denies that the separation between teaching and research makes teaching a second-class citizen. Staff can equally be recognised for their effort in both areas, and with members of the institutes moving between research and teaching, the latest research is reflected in the curriculum.

The advantage is that the formal separation between research and teaching duties allows individual members of staff to focus appropriately.

The revolving-door model

Another model for change is that adopted by the University of Hertfordshire. There the vice chancellor, Tim Wilson believes universities need to revise their thinking in order to become business facing and develop more effective relationships with industry.

“Research clearly has a role to play in innovation – but it not the whole story,” he says. “We can have the best researchers in the world, but if we do not have an innovation culture, then we will fail to reap the economic benefits from our ideas.”  

Wilson claims that Hertfordshire has created a revolving door, with business, academics and students constantly exchanging ideas, and constantly moving between the business workplace and the universities  

One of the foundations of this was the merger of the university with one of the county’s leading business organisations, Exemplas. This has created new connections between thousands of businesses and the university causing Wilson to claim that “no university anywhere has such connectivity.”

Satisfied customers

Surveys carried out by the university show an increase in satisfaction from business clients. At the same time there has been increase in applied research carried out by the university; a growth in professional development programmes; more students working in business as part of their studies; and an increase in graduate employment skills.  

In short, says Wilson, a business-facing university not only preaches the importance of innovation, but demonstrates it and practices innovation itself.

While Janet Finch claims that as the first of the UK’s post-war campus universities Keele is building on its traditions, the scale of reform and the speed of action needed to become truly innovation-friendly is inevitably disruptive.

This has prompted other universities to approach reform piece-meal. They have set down markers for an innovation culture, applying for grants that stipulate industry involvement, setting up technology transfer offices, agreeing long-term technology commercialisation deals with professional companies, varying the terms of academic tenure to enable staff to get involved in spinning out their research,  and building technology incubators.

But the stark fact is that gradual, comfortable, ignorable, change, is not sufficient. Universities need to be leaders, not followers, of the move to demand-driven innovation.