Changing Higher Education

Update on KAUST

The King Abdulla University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is moving along on its development plans (see King Abdulla University of Science and Technology - a paradigm for the 21st century? June 5, 2007).  In January, KAUST got off to an excellent start with the appointment of Shih Choon Fong as its first President.  Dr Shih is currently the very highly regarded President of the National University of Singapore, and will assume the presidency of KAUST next December.

KAUST is not waiting for its president to arrive, however, before implementing its plans to build by creating partnerships with the leading educational institutions in the world.  Although some of the agreements took some time to actually finalize, previously announced partnerships and dates are:
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institutite (June 15, 2007)
Institute Francais de Petrole ( June 22, 2007)
National University of Singapore (June 27, 2007)
IIT Bombay (July 16, 2007)
American University in Cairo (September 5, 2007)
Technische Universitat Munchen (January 24, 2008).
Each of these agreements describes partnerships in specific areas of research and education, with financial arrangements that vary to meet the circumstances.

In the last two days, three very significant new partnership arrangement with American universities have been announced.  On March 4, agreements with the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) and Stanford University were announced, and on March 5, an agreement with the University of Texas at Austin was announced.  It is reported that Stanford and UCB will each receive almost $30M over 5 years as part of this partnership.  Of that, $10 will be for participating departments, $10M will be for joint research at the institutions involving new KAUST faculty, $5M will be for joint research at KAUST, and $3M-$4M will be for administrative costs.  Stanford and UCB will each have responsibilities in identifying and helping to recruit faculty for KAUST, and in hosting KAUST faculty until the KAUST campus opens.  The conditions at UT are more or less the same.

All in all, a very impressive list of partner institutions.  The quality and the international visibility of each of them helps to assure that KAUST will indeed begin to develop following international norms for access and freedom of inquiry.

The breakdown of the price-productivity-cost model of private research universities

I have learned a lot recently  participating in a project on Global Higher Education led by Paul Jansen and Debby Bielak of McKinsey &Co.  The project is sponsored by the Forum for the Future of Higher Education. Paul and Debby have collected a group of university CFO’s, a college president, and an old provost (me) together to apply a McKinsey sector-wide analysis to higher education. It is fascinating to see what such an analysis tells us about our world.

The team recently made a presentation entitled Higher Education Trends and Risks: Implications for Leading Institutions and Sector Performance  at the annual Aspen Symposium of the Forum.  My assignment was to talk about trends and risks for private research universities - in 15 minutes.  I approached this impossible task by first apologizing to the audience for the egregious simplifications that I would have to make in order to describe the situation in 15 minutes, and then introduced my simple one-parameter model to describe the problems facing the research university.  Since this model met with some approval at the Symposium, I thought it might be worth repeating here.

I began by describing what I called our Mission Box. Excellence - as defined by us in a very self-referential way - has become the visible driver of our mission.  Our mission, in a very general way, focuses on traditional undergraduate education, graduate and professional education, and research.  Focusing on excellence means that if it is worth doing (i.e. one of our mission foci), it is worth doing better.  Doing it better costs more money, so at some point the customer can’t, or won’t pay for it, so we lose money.  As a consequence, over time, losing money has become our very visible surrogate for excellence (my one parameter model). (Clayton Christensen, who also spoke at the symposium, has pointed out the often catastrophic outcomes of making your product better than the customer wants or needs. See also Disruptive Technologies:when great universities fail? March 3, 2006)

Changing US output in science and technology

The NSF just released two interesting reports. Changing US Output of Scientific Articles:1988-2003 is a detailed analysis of publications in refereed journals over that time period.  The companion publication, Changing Research and Publication Environment in American Research Universities, is based on interviews with scientists in 9 leading US research universities.

The first report extends and quantifies the well known result that the American share of international research publications has been dropping over time as other countries build their scientific and engineering capabilities.  More importantly, it also shows the very surprising result that the absolute number of US scientific publications in peer reviewed journals has plateaued or dropped since the early 1990s. The second report seeks to understand that flattening  of US research output.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology - a paradigm for the 21st century?

The recently announced King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) deserves a closer look for several reasons.    First, the King has created a multibillion dollar fund to build and endow the university.  The university, a residential and commercial center, and a research park will all be constructed on a 3,200 acre site on the Red Sea. Second, the university will be merit based, open to men and women students and researchers from around the world, chosen only on the basis of academic qualification.  One of its goals is to contribute to the transformation of the Saudi society into a knowledge producing force.

One of the most interesting reasons for looking at the plans for KAUST, however, is that considerable thought clearly has gone into its formulation (there are several people on the International Advisory Council from the Washington Advisory Group, for example).  Thus, this reflects at least one thoughtful view of how one would create a 21st century university from scratch if one had really substantial resources in hand.

Outsourcing research

InnoCentive has an intriguing business model.  As described on their website:
"InnoCentive® is an exciting web-based community matching top scientists to relevant R&D challenges facing leading companies from around the globe. We provide a powerful online forum enabling major companies to reward scientific innovation through financial incentives."
If your company cannot solve an important technical problem, you register as a seeker; if you are a scientist, engineer, etc  with a bit of free time and an itch to solve some interesting problems, you register as a solver. InnoCentive gets the seekers and solvers together, with financial prizes from the seekers to the solver or solvers who produce the useful solutions.  The Rockefeller Foundation has recently partnered with InnoCentive to apply the same platform to global development problems.  In this case, the seekers will be non-profit entities chosen by the Foundation that serve poor or vulnerable peoples.

One might be tempted to think that this “dating service” approach to problem solving could be useful only to small start-ups that cannot afford their own research.  Turns out, if you think that, you are really wrong.  A recent Harvard Business School working paper by K.R. Lakhani, L.B.Jeppesen, P.A.Lohse and J.A.Panetta has analyzed InnoCentive results for 166 scientific problems that the research laboratories of “large and well-known R&D-intensive firms had been unsuccessful in solving internally.” Several of the problems reflected several years of unsuccessful effort in the company’s research labs.  The results are fascinating.

The UC Berkeley Energy Biosciences Institute - a link in the knowledge supply chain?

There has been a lot of conversation and concern over the proposed Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley.  The UC description of EBI puts it directly into Pasteur’s quadrant of research that is both fundamental and applied to problems of importance to society:   

The Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI)  is a new research and development organization that will bring advanced knowledge in biology, physical sciences, engineering, and environmental and social sciences to bear on problems related to global energy production, particularly the development of next-generation, carbon-neutral transportation fuels.

However, the controversy stems not so much from the nature of the research, but the partnership behind the project, which involves an unusually close university-corporate relationship:

EBI represents a collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and BP, which will support the Institute with a 10-year $500 million grant. EBI's multidisciplinary teams will collectively explore total-system approaches to problems that include the sustainable production of cellulosic biofuels, enhanced biological carbon sequestration, bioprocessing of fossil fuels and biologically-enhanced petroleum recovery.

EBI will educate a new generation of students in all areas of bioenergy, and will serve as a model for large-scale academic-industry collaborations. By partnering with a major energy company, EBI will facilitate and accelerate the translation of basic science and engineering research to improved products and processes for meeting the world's energy needs in the 21st century.

This relationship will involve both the presence of 50 or so resident BP scientists on the campuses of UC and the University of Illinois, and a shared governance (and funding) process involving both BP and the academic institutions.  Details are still being worked out, but faculty, understandably and appropriately, have raised numerous issues relating to commercial influence on research and academic freedom, and the impact of this new entity on university internal issues of shared governance.

From my perspective, this partnership is another step for Berkeley towards a leadership role in what I earlier described (What business are we in? March 1, 2006) as management of the knowledge supply chain. In that earlier post, I suggested that one of the roles for universities in the future could be to both create new knowledge, and to see that that knowledge moves swiftly and effectively to the end users.  This would involve new types of close partnerships -process networks (see What has offshoring got to do with research universities? Feb.22, 2006) - between knowledge producers and users working towards a common goal.  Such partnerships need not be either exclusive or permanent, but would focus on an area where the partnership could bring mutual benefit. Of course, many partnerships already exist between academe and industry, but this EBI arrangement, through its scale and aspirations (including creation of the new discipline of Energy Biosciences), would seem to move to the next plane.

Modularity in university higher education: Research

(Continuing the discussion begun in Modularity in university higher education, June 16, 2006)

Research is, of course, what defines the reputation of most university faculty.  In turn, the reputation of the faculty builds the reputation of the university.   Thus the connecting input characteristics of the research module must be defined in a way that it supports the efforts of the faculty in this domain.  In addition, there are very close ties between research and Ph.D. education, and so one of the outputs that one would have to maintain for a research module is that it be appropriate for graduate training and, increasingly, undergraduate research experiences. However, in many if not most of our major research universities, there are research centers- often quite large - whose primary mission is not training, but production of focused sponsored research for, typically, government, sometimes industry.  Indeed, at one limit, many such centers do classified research, which is inappropriate for the training of students.   Much of the research in these centers generally is not carried out by regular faculty, but by a staff of professional researchers.  Thus, even in some cases when the research itself may  be quite appropriate for graduate training, lack of involved faculty mentors may give these centers marginal value for graduate training. The rational for having such centers will vary from university to university, but for those centers most removed from the academic center, the rational is often tied up in the larger service role of the university.  Such centers can contribute significantly to the reputation of the university, thus bringing value in a different dimension. 

Thus we see within a typical large university at least two different types of research module.  One of these is closely aligned with aspirations of regular faculty and with graduate training, and therefore has rather well defined input and output characteristics that allow it to work synergistically with other modules (e.g. education) in the university.  The other is more divorced from the educational component of the university, and tied in perhaps with the service component. Its output requirements are primarily that it satisfy its funding sources, input requirement that it do so in a way that enhances the reputation of the university e.g. through service, or perceived excellence.  Of course, the reality is that there is a continuum of possibilities that lies between these two types of modules.  However, these two extreme cases will let us investigate how the opportunities of globalization might lead to improvements in both.

And the leader in R&D is...

As described in my Feb. 17, 2006 post, the World in 2020, a recent report of the National Intelligence Council suggested that only 14 years from now, the engine of the world economy might have shifted from the US to China and other countries in Asia, and that leadership in science and technology might have moved from the US to the same Asian countries.   In a May 16, 2006 post entitled Where is the engine of the world economy?, I called attention to a recent LA Times article that seems to show that China is moving along a path that would enable it to achieve the economic status predicted by the NIC.  The recently released 2006 Science and Education Indicators from the National Science Board would seem to indicate that China is also on track to realizing the NIC predictions in the science and technology area.

Excess Intellectual Capacity

This post might well be titled The Many Pathways to Globalization II. As I thought about Suzanne Berger’s discussion in How We Compete regarding the need for corporations to have “excess capacity” –both in terms of production capabilities and research - in order to respond quickly to future opportunities, I realized I had heard some of that argument before in a very different, but not unrelated, context. In 1945, Vannevar Bush in his enormously influential report Science-The Endless Frontier, made a very closely related point in arguing for government support of basic university research.

Noting the critical contributions of science to the war effort, Bush argued that it was an appropriate role of government to create “scientific capital” which could improve the economy and enable the country to better defend itself should another war erupt. Creation of scientific capital encompassed both educating more people, and supporting high level research. Most interestingly, Bush believed this scientific capital must not be inspired by focusing on some societal problem that needed to be solved. Rather its creation should be driven by the interests and creativity of the researchers themselves. That is, research should be investigator initiated and driven. Bush defined this goal-independent, investigator initiated research as “basic”. Thus Bush’s scientific capital is similar on a broader scale to the excess intellectual capital that Berger suggests was critical to many of the corporate product innovations of the past decades -- knowledge created without constraints that it fit an immediate need, “warehoused” for use in an as-yet unknown circumstance.

What business are we in?

A key question for every corporation over the recent decades of turbulence in the national and international marketplace has been AWhat business are we in?@ As conditions changed, those corporations that really understood their business were best able to emerge in a strengthened situation. Often, companies decided that their existing understanding of their businesses were too restrictive. An oft-cited example of such a case is UPS, which realized its business was not simply delivering packages in its familiar brown trucks, but rather provision of logistics processes to a diverse spectrum of customers.  They are supply chain managers for companies of all sizes worldwide, working intimately with companies to design every aspect of their supply-chain.  In doing so, UPS moved from being a simple shipper of goods on request for corporations, to being a partner with corporations in the production and sales (and repairs) of their products. This partnership enables the corporations to better focus on their core businesses, and has enabled UPS to flourish. (A nice description of the UPS role in the changing world is given by Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat, p 141-150.)

Universities have tended not to ask what business we are in. Or perhaps the answer seemed to be too obvious - A what we are doing now is our business.@ As we look to the future of universities, however, this obvious answer simply will not enable us to imagine a broad enough spectrum of possible futures. As conditions change, what opportunities should we embrace, which should we ignore? What components of what we do today are to be strengthened, and which might be phased out?

This will be my first take this important question, and is intended to begin exploration of various models rather than provide a proposal for action. The model that I discuss here might be called the “UPS model”, or, more specifically, the Knowledge Chain Manager model.