Can university research catapult us to a new era of global prosperity?

{Source: An excerpt of the discussions from the LinkedIn group Global Academic Innovation Network (GAIN) }

Richard Litman, Patent Attorney - The great thinkers of the world became the catalyst for technological enlightenment and economic growth in past centuries. Ingenuity catapulted the world’s economy to new horizons.

Electricity, oil, nuclear power and other sources of energy fueled the growth of the global economy in the last century. With electricity came lighting, electronics and the age of information technology. With oil came the proliferation of automobiles, jet airplanes and the use of plastics. The nuclear era brought even further discoveries in medicine, space exploration and energy.

Economic prosperity can return, and return quickly, through good old-fashioned ingenuity.

The stimulus for economic recovery and expansion in the 21st century will come from the world's most plentiful resource: the human capital of people. Innovation is the answer for this century just as it has been in the past.

Universities that have adopted this core philosophy have become catalysts for economic vitality. It is a proven formula for sustainable growth of the economy.

Our global economic woes can be cured by technological innovation and the growth of small and large businesses fueled by university research. It may take a cure for cancer or some new form of energy to catapult the economy back to an era of prosperity. It could be that incremental improvements on existing technologies are all that is needed for our return to prosperity. Universities need to embrace this spirit today. Those which foster an environment where creativity and out of the box thinking are part of the core culture will help the global economy thrive in the 21st century.

An investment in university based innovation is one of the best investments we can make to stimulute the economy for a new era of enlightenment and worldwide economic growth.

Suddha Sattwa Basu, Analyst - Almost all of the large and medium scale leading universities of the world resembles any average small to medium sized company. And this large-to-medium scale which I am talking about is the scale of research output from these universities. The net volume and quality of the cumulated research output from a multi-faculty university is always the primary measure of the true quality of that particular university in consideration.Now this net resarch output is in a way the Intellectual Capital of the institution, which will include number of PhDs passing in one year, quality oftheir thesis work, number and quality of post-doctoral fellows, international accredition, number of patents - filed/granted, technology/patent license agreements, activity of the university technology transfer offices, software copyright enforcement practices followed, trade mark licensing of the valued university logo, start up companies formed as incubations on the university campus, charismatic nobel laureate teachers, iconic past students, great money funding from good relationships with government and large global corporations and above all a cross disciplinary peer culture of out-of-the-box thinking which is driven by an eccentric creative urge that runs equally through the veins of teachers and students alike. When we have all the above components in a perfect mix then we have the "ideal university innovation ecosystem". This in turn changes everything around us...people,patents,products,processes..everything.This will always be the way forward.

M. Karen Walker, Advisor at State Department Global Partnership Initiative We also must remember to consider the quality of the questions and rationale for lines of inquiry. Having worked in research in government laboratory and interagency settings, I can attest to the importance of requirements generation, involvement of end-users in the research program, and consistently reinforced yet flexible expectations. Hmmm ... perhaps there is a role here for the Humanities after all!

Phil Clare - Associate Director at Oxford University Research Services - I agree that Universities are central to our economy and society. If anyone doubts that, spend five minutes imagining how the world would develop if we suddesnly took them all away. My one note of caution is that we must remember the variability of timescales here. It takes at least three years to produce an undergraduate, six or seven for a PhD student, decades for GPS to use the mathematics developed to explore Einstein's work in satnavs. Investment in universities will drive the future knowledge economy, but it's no magic bulllet to drive up share prices next week... All of us in the great Universities of the world are deeply conscious of the need to maximise the impact of what we do on society. I worry that some expectations are a tad unrealistic though!

Erik Van Lennep, Strategy Consultant - "The great thinkers of the world became the catalyst for technological enlightenment and economic growth in past centuries. Ingenuity catapulted the world’s economy to new horizons......"

I do believe that academic institutions and public research, especially "action-research" have a great deal to offer in setting a new standard and opening innovative pathways, outside the box. But, and this is a serious BUT, it will not likely be something driven by the mega-universities, which are so cumbersome and politically hobbled that in many aspects internal communication is dysfunctional. I think the possibility of fresh directions and economic recovery are more to be found in smaller universities and colleges which can move more quickly and flexibly, whose need to compete successfully for students keeps them closer to the cutting edge. The other place I expect to see novel and appropriate solutions evolve is in collaborative work involving many stakeholders from academia to industry and community.

The true value in my mind, the acid test for universities' relevance, must always lie with the quality of education they offer, with the engagement and enlightenment and enthusiasm developed in their students and graduates. This is what universities are meant to be, and the justification for their founding. I agree with the list of outputs and values suggested by Suddha Sattwa Basu earlier, but I also want to note that these have evolved as a result of universities first and foremost creating environments for high quality learning, and most especially...questioning.

The fact that academia has historically sheltered and nurtured bright minds to stay on and deepen their research, ideally in an atmosphere which encourages a challenging depth of questioning is essential to what we now need them to provide in terms of innovation and socio-economic policy development. Yes it's a slow process, and in some cases unnecessarily so. An important direction to watch is "action-research", which like action-learning, values the information gathered in tandem with real-life project development.

To find ways in which universities, industry, policy makers and funders can work together to fulfill pressing human needs, from the economic to the inspirational, we will need to unhook university funding from big industry, and then renegotiate what that valuable connection is about. We need to return university research as much to real world and community solutions as we do to corporate IP arrangements and profit sharing. A fresh look, engaging more stakeholders would open some exciting and constructive new arrangements. Industry in the end will still benefit, probably even more than before, but so will community, researchers, and above all, the students