BY MENGESHA AMARE
Universities and industries have, up to recent times, relatively separated and have been distinct institutional spheres. The role of government in relation to these two spheres is changing in apparently contradictory directions at present, if truth be told. The government is offering incentives, on the one hand, and pressing academic institutions, on the other, to go beyond performing the traditional functions of cultural memory, education and research, and make a more direct contribution to national asset creation.
True, the Ethiopian government is also shifting its relationships to economic institutions, becoming both much more involved in various activities to transform the economy of the country. The collaborative effort of universities with industry with a view to fostering knowledge transfer has progressively increased since recently, indeed!
Cognizant of the fact that the University-industry linkage is tantamount to amalgamating national assets to make a difference, The Ethiopian Herald held talks with Aster Muleta, and Industrial Engineer graduated from Addis Ababa University and working for a private firm. She said, “Many of the efforts exerted so far have been directed at industries or firms located at a distance from the university, and sometimes in a different country.
Hence, we Ethiopians have to well exploit the untapped opportunity and significance of industry-University linkage regardless of geographical location of the actual task and the university site, low level of research and training schemes and the less public awareness about the joint effort of the two via increasing the frequency of university-industry collaborations and the probability of departments engaging firm association.”
As to her, for the last decade and a half, the role played by universities in economic growth, particularly through university–industry linkages, has been occupying the minds of policymakers and academics equally. The direct influence of university research in economic development is, however, not new. Universities are highly pronouncing the agriculture sector, for example, through their research on new varieties of seeds, disease resistant crops as these have been playing a vital role in increasing the ¬agricultural productivity and farmers’ incomes since their inception.
According to Aster, extension services provided by the agricultural universities, through which they transferred new technologies and-associated knowledge to farmers, have been the main canals through which-university research has been commercialized and rhetorical discourses have feasibly been translated into practical actions and started bearing fruits. This is how the country can make a difference in all aspects.
She further stated that many countries are moving to embrace concepts of knowledge based economic development that bring the knowledge, productive and regulatory spheres of society into new configurations. At this era of science and technology, Ethiopians peculiarly scientists and researchers have to take the lead to play the decisive role in pushing the country a number of steps forward using science and technology in this ever changing national, regional, continental and global environment with a focus on the universities’ position in the newly emerging knowledge infrastructure and state-of-the art technological advancement.
“Industry-university cooperation is a new form of technological innovation, and technical innovation is an important means to achieve sustainable development. Most of the existing researches on industry-university cooperation focus on the analysis of industry-university cooperation models, but there are few researches on the examination of the relationship between industry-university cooperation and economic development. Industry-university cooperation has had a positive effect on countries’ economic development as it has a potential to affect economic development through technological innovation,” she added.
When we take the endogenous economic theory into account, she said, technological innovation, as one of the endogenous driving forces of economic growth, mainly comes from enterprises, universities, and scientific research institutions. “Industry-university cooperation highlights the linkage role of enterprises in the process of knowledge production and application. It also helps universities and research institutions commercialize their innovations. It is quite useful to note that industry-university cooperation has received wide attention,” she opined.
The relationship between industry-university cooperation and economic development can be enriched via technological novelty. The significance of industry-university cooperation, technological innovation, and regional economic growth is of untold importance in fostering growth and change, she added. Aster said, “Undeniably, industry-university cooperation has been associated with economic development. There is an interaction between industry-university cooperation and technological innovation.
Hence, the government should optimize the technological innovation environment through of course encouraging enterprises, universities, and research institutions to jointly carry out technological innovation activities, improving the technology innovation system and promoting the transfer of innovation achievements and encouraging enterprises to carry out scientific and technological innovation activities by streamlining administration and delegating power.”
Besides, she said the government should improve the quality of industry-university cooperation. It can use preferential policies to guide in-depth industry-university collaboration and standardize as well as optimize the cooperation model between universities, enterprises, and research institutions, improve the common management of research funds, and strengthen the sharing of interests and risks, too.
It should also pay attention to the collaborative innovation development of industry, university, and research institutes. Such a rewarding approach can also improve the intellectual property protection system, standardize the operation of the technical knowledge market, and promote the effective use of collaborative innovation by industry, universities, and research institutions.
As to her, a triple helix move, university-industry-government interaction is increasingly the basis of economic and social development strategy in both industrially advanced and developing sates of the world. Universities have assumed an expanded role in science and technology-based economic development that has become of interest to catch-up areas as well as to leading innovation settings. This could be made real via well training students and cub researchers about the invaluable significance of university-industry linkage, she said.
As the modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge as well as fuels transformation from that of a knowledge factory to a knowledge hub, to advance technological innovation and economic development, she said Ethiopia has now well embarked on the university-Industry bond more than ever before. “One of the hallmarks of a knowledge hub is that it serves as a boundary-spanning organization that accumulates mediating functions for the exchange of tacit as well as codified knowledge between academia and local business and financial communities,” Aster elaborated.
“Universities are currently undergoing a technology revolution these days, incorporating economic and social development as part of their mission. This can be regarded as the first academic transformation made research an academic function apart from teaching. Now the emerging entrepreneurial university integrates economic development as an additional function, too. Besides, a complex web of relationships has grown up among academics, university originated start-ups and larger firms,” she underlined.
She further said that the growth of a commercial ethos within academia and the emergence of healthy competition over this development culminate in normative change in science as the most deeply held value of scientists is the extension of knowledge. To contribute to this is the highest striving of scientists. In the face of a tight academic job market, opportunities have opened up in industries, businesses or firms based upon academic knowledge and wisdom of translating theoretical inputs into palpable bounties.
From an industrial perspective, Aster stated that relations with universities have traditionally been viewed primarily as a source of human capital, future employees and, secondarily, as a source of knowledge useful to the firm. In this view what industry wants and needs from academic researchers is basic research knowledge; therefore, universities should focus on their traditional missions of research and education, their unique function.
In a nutshell, the relation of universities and industrial enterprises are an important topic of science strategy and the sociology of discipline. Fundamentally, as the direct measure of university–industry interaction allows Ethiopia to assess the factors that affect the probability of a firm developing cooperation with higher learning institutions, the country is expected to attach due emphasis to the scheme it has already commenced to make real difference regarding the socio-economic transformation thereby driving the wheel of other sectors well.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD THURSDAY 8 JUNE 2023
