Topics for debates - 中欧社会论坛 - China Europa Forum

Topics for debates

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- 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.