Changing Higher Education

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.

University of New South Wales exits Singapore

On April 24, 2004, the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the Singapore Economic Development Board announced that UNSW would be setting up “the first foreign private university in Singapore”. The new entity was to be something quite unusual:
Unlike other foreign universities which set up franchises or joint-campus operations overseas, UNSW Singapore will be wholly-owned, independently governed and run by UNSW. It will be a research and teaching campus with a strong science and technology focus.
The goal was to have 15,000 students in the steady state, 70% of whom would be international students.  This initiative was to be a key element of Singapore’s Global Schoolhouse Effort.  In other words, this was an important experiment in the globalization of higher education.

This last week, UNSW announced  to its students that it was closing down its Singapore campus before it really began.

The only explanation that has been presented so far is that of UNSW, which simply said that initial enrollment did not meet expectations. Clearly this cannot be the only reason, given the significant investment both parties must have made by this point (reports in the media regarding the investments are so wildly different that they don't bear repeating).  Thus, one should not leap to conclusions yet about what this says about the globalization of higher education.  However, it does make one remember the difficulties that my old institution, Johns Hopkins, had with their Center in Singapore.  It was closed down just about a year ago because, according to the Singapore government, it had not met its research and educational goals. 

Eric Beerkens has a very nice summary of background and some of the questions raised by this closing in a recent post on his blog  Clearly, this situation will need to be looked at more closely as more information comes out so that we can draw some useful lessons.

At last, the Democratic alternative to the McKeon tuition cap proposal

“I think higher education doesn’t win elections, but no candidate wants to be accused of ignoring the issue of college access.  It is important to have something in your list of policies that is relatively catchy, simple and credible.”
Robert Shireman, president of the Institute for College Access and Success, as quoted in insidehighereducation.com

I described in an earlier post (Price and Cost in Higher Education: price and the political-economic system, Jan 11, 2007)some of the political forces that make higher education access an increasingly important priority of government. I also noted that this powerful trend had to be accommodate within the reality that shrinking federal resources preclude additional government outlays to increase access. My earlier post described some of the approaches being proposed to accomplish both of these ends.   One of these approaches, championed by Republican Rep. “Buck” McKeon, called for penalties for colleges whose tuition increases exceeded the CPI increase by some amount- caps on tuition increases, in effect.   

Now that the Democrats have taken over the Congress, I have been awaiting the Democratic alternatives for solving this problem.  It is now beginning to take shape. The Chronicle of Higher Education headline captures this bold new Democratic thinking:

Congress Looks to Expand Tuition Tax Credits, May Tax Higher Education to Cover Costs

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.