中欧社会论坛 - China Europa Forum

Workshop presentation

Knowledge transfer in forms of product and technology from higher education institutions to industries has gained elevated importance as the Third Mission of higher education institutions who now play increasingly more important roles in economic development of the communities where they are located. Many education and technology policies catered toward the encouragement of such activities have acted as influential forces on the dynamics between universities and the industries, some, such as the Bayh-Dole Act in the USA, cast fundamental impact on institutional advancement.

While China considers University-Industrial Technology Transfer (UITT) as an effective strategic measure to sustain regional innovation, European societies assert the needs for the check and balance for the application of new technology for value of societal stakeholders. The perception and management of potential risks of knowledge transfer that are considered for their economic values only may deserve more holistic attention. An obvious area of concern would be genetic engineering, now commonly applied for agricultural modification. Although both bodies have established safety regulation controls, China appears to be utilitarian in ready adoption of new technologies without much extended assessment beyond the sphere of applications, albeit with a few exceptions already on the agenda of concern on the global agenda (e.g. environments, climate change). In this regard, Europe appears to be more aware of issues beyond apparent economic exploitation with acts and practice along the Precaution Principle.

Topics for debates

 Should there be a policy framework in establishing overarching principles for assessing the impact of technologies, particularly those from scholarly activities?

 Currently assessments of technologies are mostly conducted by experts from the same field that may not carry holistic stakeholder value. To ensure the interest of the society at large, should the governance of UITT involve well-represented but autonomous expert/community bodies at both local and international level to cast balanced views on UITT activities and their impact?

 For the universities themselves, UITT adds a further dimension, and therefore requirement, on its faculty staff. To encourage and empower related endeavours at grass-root level, should recruitment and performance assessment criteria of faculty staff include knowledge transfer metrics?

 At a tangent, should universities actively engage, or profess to be actively engaged with extra resources in knowledge transfer activities just to attract more tangible (financial) and intangible (reputation, goodwill) benefits?

 From an operation perspective, besides philosophical debates on the virtue (or evil) of the Third Mission, what would be good determining factors for universities/research institutes in allocating resources for applied technology development endeavours beyond the point of scholarly knowledge discovery?

 Specifically, what would be a proper decision-making and management structure for UITT that would address the overall interest of the institution?

 Universities are accustomed to rules and systems with collegiality, whereas industries emphasize entrepreneurship and leadership to thrive from strength to strength.Positioned to give the best to both worlds, should the management of UITT operations be rule-based (i.e., governance system driven) or people-oriented (i.e., executive-led)?

Our group will solicit and digest views from academia, industries and policy administrators to provide some insight for these questions.

About us

Dr Alwin Wong (黄亮)

Marius Burgat