26 education & business roundtable


... continued from previous page ”It also seems to me that all HE/FE institutions are being forced down the road of third-funding (public, student, and business) – getting more income in from industry through improved collaboration.”


Dr Mike Wilkinson admitted one reason he was recruited by Southampton Solent University was to help to increase such funding and involvement with business. ”This change has been going on for some years but it has also been accelerated by the government’s current reforms. Through the ages universities have raised funds through their local communities and alumni, so this process should not be viewed as a cataclysmic change for the sector.


Andrew Heathcock


”Universities have been around for 800 years in the UK and I expect them to be around for another 800 years, but maybe in a different model.


”In my view, universities have never been more business facing than they are now. Coming back into the sector after 20 years in industry, I didn’t really recognise the culture because it had moved on so much.”


Murray queried if some universities were further ahead in their transformation than others.


”I prefer the horizontal model of diversity of institutions rather than the vertical model of league tables, but, like businesses, universities adapt to the environment they are in,” Wilkinson replied.


Dr David Ramsden


Carol Pike agreed that universities and FE institutions are being forced to take a more commercial focus, and she asked if they are now setting themselves objectives to employ and utilise more people with a business background.


Stark pointed out that no universities are alike, although most are either commercially or research focused. Creating an appropriate staff balance between academic and commercial abilities was important to establish a suitable student culture and to attract the right funding. Research funding for example, was often geared to high academic ability. ”It is about institutions recognising their relative values of academic and commercial experience.”


Dr Mike Wilkinson


Wilkinson: ”Academic rigour is really important, because it marks out what a university is. At Solent we like to like say that we are blending theory and practice. We want our academics to be practitioners and teach students in the skills of working life, but they have to do that from a sound academic basis. That’s much easier said than done.


”In the past, lecturers came into education with industry experience, stayed for 20 years but were not obliged to review what they know. Nowadays, universities are making sure that lecturers keep up-to- date and interact with their relevant industry sector.”


Leigh Sara-Timberlake


Such updating was essential with technology rapidly advancing and the Internet having created the global ’Information Age’. China and India were still teaching learning by rote, he noted, whereas the UK FE/HE system was much more about teaching students how to learn through the educational content. ”That’s important because in this age of the Internet, today’s content won’t be tomorrow’s content.”


Wilkinson also pointed out that academic and professional accrediting body validation of new


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courses could also sometimes take too long. ”In this new commercial world we need to make our university processes fleeter of foot so that we can get our new products out there faster.”


Is enough being done to assist knowledge transfer and spinouts?


Peter Birkett: ”The University of Southampton has got a very good record for generating spinout companies, but spinouts are only one way of achieving knowledge transfer.


”The commonly held view is that spinouts come about because academics generate some fresh IP and they want to see it exploited, but in my experience that motivation is quite limited. Many academics are in academia because they value that culture. The challenge for us is to draw out the knowledge that is wrapped up in the heads of academics.”


He suggested local industries should focus on students, especially final-year students and post-graduates. ”They are the ones who have the right contact with high-quality academic institutions but also the fleetness, desire and vision to exploit the knowledge they have gained.”


Dr David Ramsden suggested the key people to motivate about commercial exploitation would be post graduates ”who have laboured and done most of the work for which the academic may get the credit”.


Birkett: ”Finding the right IP with the right market opportunity and the right people to make a spinout happen is relatively rare. We try to create an environment where spinouts can thrive but they don’t appear off a production line.”


Whitaker agreed that high-growth, high-innovation businesses are a rarity. (NESTA research has shown that between 2002 and 2008 the 6% of UK businesses with the highest growth rates generated half of the new jobs created.) ”We must do all we can to nurture those businesses by making the pathway to key funding at critical moments as clear and easy as possible.”


Radioisotope research specialist Ramsden said that the Enterprise Fellowship scheme run by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which funded two of his former postgraduate students, was crucial in the first year of his company’s formation. They are now both directors of the company.


”Following the decision to proceed with the major space mission INTEGRAL I could see there was not likely to be any further instrumentation challenges for me in Space Astronomy. As a consequence, I turned to concentrate on industrial and medical imaging problems that used a similar technology. I was also at stage in my career when I could afford to concentrate on applied physics for a change. It’s difficult for a younger person to venture out of pure academic research into applied research and business formation within the present scheme of things.


Whitaker asked Ramsden what would make it easier to ”unlock that repository of know-how and commercialise it?”


Most academics chose their career path in order to THE BUSINESS MAGAZINE – SOLENT & SOUTH CENTRAL – JUNE 2011


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