Innovative Education, President\u27s Progress Report 2017

How can academic leadership create a culture of INNOVATION? How can faculty more effectively convey their KNOWLEDGE? How can students learn the skills, traits, and process to become future INNOVATORS

A technology framework for the East Midlands 2008-2011

This provides a framework for targeting support for technology development by focusing on a limited number of priority areas and demonstrates a clear understanding of the region's technology strengths to investors, collaborators and policymakers

An appropriate tool for entrepreneurial learning in SMEs? The case of the 20Twenty Leadership Programme

The 20Twenty Leadership Programme was developed by Cardiff Metropolitan University as an executive education programme to be delivered within South Wales to small businesses. It is funded by the European Social Fund (ESF) and administered by the Welsh European Funding Office and has the key aim of developing SME’s growth potential via a range of leadership and management skills, including a focus on ‘soft’ skills. The focus of this paper is to place the 20Twenty Leadership Programme within the wider context of entrepreneurship policy and SME training initiatives in particular, and then to examine the rationale and delivery methods of the Programme in relation to these. It also reflects on the Programme’s success (or otherwise) to date where possible. Finally, the paper seeks to suggest fruitful areas of further research both in terms of the 20Twenty Leadership Programme itself, but also with regard to evaluation in relation to other parallel programmes, and to SME training initiatives more generally

Improving performance through HEI–industry engagements in the built environment

The poor performance and inefficiencies of the construction industry are well recognized and documented. Through a variety of combined industry and government initiatives there has been a continual expression in the UK over the last decade of the urgent need to address the fragmented nature of the industry to improve its performance. A major challenge is for education and industry stakeholders to create closer and more effective relationships with each other to facilitate greater mutual understanding. ‘Accelerating Change in Built Environment Education’ (ACBEE) is a sponsored initiative designed to encourage the closer working together of industry, education and professional bodies to provide more relevant training and education. This paper introduces ACBEE, along with an evaluation framework for measuring the performance of engagements at various levels. This is followed by an analysis of the application of this performance measurement framework through case studies of industry–education engagement. A number of case studies were identified as operating at the grades of ‘strategic alliance’ and ‘partnership’ (as classified in the ACBEE evaluation framework). The analysis of these cases focuses on the drivers behind and the purpose of the engagement, and how these are aligned with the business strategy of the collaborating organizations and measurement of the activity. Evidence of meeting the explicit business needs and strategic objectives and the contribution to good practice knowledge are also discussed

Innovate and prosper: ensuring Australia's future competitiveness through university-industry collaboration

Executive summary The continuation of Australia’s economic growth is under threat. In order to sustain the levels of prosperity we have previously experienced, we have to build on our competitive edge in key industries to remain globally competitive. Alongside these developments, Australia’s higher education system is under increased pressure to become more productive and develop courses that address employability. Innovation represents the most reliable and sustainable solution to transition into a high value, high wage economy. Yet Australia ranks 29th out of 30 in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in terms of the proportion of large businesses and small to medium enterprises (SMEs) collaborating with higher education and public research institutions on innovation.   This report acts as the next level of detail to publications such as the Department of Industry’s Boosting the Commercial Returns from Research report and the Business Council of Australia’s Building Australia’s Comparative Advantages, which have highlighted Australia’s poor performance in collaborative innovation. We present five recommendations that are a call to action to universities, industry and Government to take the necessary steps to build an innovation economy. They are not a call for additional funding from Government, rather a more effective way of using our existing resources. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) have engaged with leading figures from industry, including the Australian Industry Group (Ai Group), and partnered with the ATN to develop this five point action plan for Government, the university sector and industry 5 that will provide incentives and impetus for collaboration. Our recommendations include: Rebalance the national research agenda to underpin Australia\u27s economy and future prosperity Create incentives for university-industry collaboration Train researchers for diverse careers Enhance career mobility between industry, academia and government Provide incentives for co-investment in research infrastructure between universities, industry and state and federal government Each recommendation contains a number of practical strategies for consideration by Government, universities and industry. The hope is that the report will encourage dialogue between the three groups and prompt bold policy changes in the coming 12 months and beyond. &nbsp

Progression of college students in England to higher education: BIS research paper number 239

This report presents the findings of research undertaken for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) into the progression to higher education of students from all the FE Colleges and Sixth Form Colleges in England. It is longitudinal research and the report relates to cohorts of students between the academic years 2007-08 and 2011-12 entering higher education (HE) between the years 2008-09 and 2012-13. This research provides a unique and comprehensive picture of the very different factors underlying the progression behaviour of students progressing to higher education from colleges rather than from school sixth forms. It is unique because it traces progression into both full and part-time higher education and into higher education offered in colleges themselves as well as universities. It is comprehensive because it looks at both the college courses that students progress from and the HE courses they progress to and it analyses trends over time looking at underlying demographic data. It illustrates the added value that FE and Sixth Form Colleges contribute by looking at the GCSE results students leave school with before going to college and it looks at the achievement rates of those awarded degrees including those with First and Upper Second class honours. The research findings are based on the matching of Individualised Learner Record (ILR) datasets for 2007-08 to 2011-12 for FE and Sixth Form College students that achieved Level 3 qualifications, with ILR and Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) datasets for 2008-09 to 2012-13. They provide a detailed analysis of the progression of students to higher education over time and the report breaks down progression into prescribed and non-prescribed higher education as well as progression to university and to higher education offered by FE Colleges (HE in FE). The matched records contain course level data as well as demographic information about the student cohorts such as age, gender, ethnicity and domicile including deprivation. The course level data provides details of the institutions and types of courses students progressed from (A level, Access, BTEC, NVQ, etc) and the programmes and institutions they progressed to. This richness in the data provides a wide set of variables that can be intersected and compared and this report provides a selection of the key factors arising from the analysis. There is the opportunity to drill down further into the data to obtain more detailed regional, institutional or themed outputs. The methodology underpinning the analysis has been developed with HESA and with HEFCE through previous research (Joslin & Smith, 2013; Joslin & Smith, 2013a and Joslin & Smith, 2014). An important new element has been included in this report, which is matching with the Department for Education’s Key Stage 4 (KS4) datasets. This has provided new information about the kinds of qualifications FE and Sixth Form College students leave school with and the role of colleges in transforming their life chances through providing the opportunity to achieve at Level 3 and to progress on to higher education

The role of organisational culture during the implementation of internal succession planning within Malaysian research universities

Succession planning is not new to academia and many institutions have supported these programs for years. Few, however, have adopted formal succession planning strategies that are both strategic and deliberate and encompass the full spectrum of succession planning activities. However, less is understood about the role of culture on succession planning within public universities in Malaysia. Nevertheless; there is an absence of a comprehensive conceptual model of the culture-succession relationship in the literature that includes the impact of moderators such as national culture. A mixed mode design was adopted by the study where qualitative data was first collected, analyzed and then used to develop a survey instrument for the quantitative phase of the study. The study surveyed 375 academic staff of the five research universities in Malaysia, and the results were analyzed using the IBM SPSS for Windows and PLS-SEM. A structural model was built to identify the relationship between the organisational culture and succession planning and the moderating effect of the national culture in public research universities. The study's findings showed that succession planning is still new to public universities in Malaysia and training and development are still unstructured. Although there was a positive and significant relationship between organisational culture and succession planning, whereas, findings suggested national culture showed a moderating effect on the relationship of organisational culture and succession planning. The model can help to analyze organisational culture in order to change the Malaysian public universities’ strategy to implement succession planning

ARE ROMANIAN UNIVERSITIES PREPARING LEADERS IN ACCOUNTING?

In 2005, the Report on the Results of the Global Accounting Education Benchmarking Pilot Project, prepared by Phelps and Karreman, found that higher education institutions were not providing the leadership role necessary to close gaps in accounting educat: accounting education, leadership in accounting, GAEB Report, accounting curricula

Understanding the potential role of membership organisations in the sustainable spread of innovation

Innovation must be defined as "change for the better" rather than as mere 'novelty' or "change for change's sake". Membership organisations have a key role to play in the cost effective spread of innovation. The best ways to spread innovation are by individual mentoring between colleagues in the same organisation, peer support, and informal networking between practitioners. But i) innovation can only flourish if the organisational culture is right; ii) changing an organisation's culture to one that supports innovation has to be done from the inside; iii) lack of time to innovate is a key constraint

Soft skills of Czech graduates

Finding a job is easier for people who are better equipped with soft skills, as they are more productive. Therefore, this article deals with the evaluation of soft skills of graduates from Czech public universities. The results show that the same soft skills are required from university graduates as from the population as a whole (only problem solving is more pronounced with them), but the required level of these skills is 42% higher in the case of graduates. Unfortunately, employers perceive the level of graduates' soft skills insufficient as their level is by 16.46 to 31.15% lower than required. A more detailed analysis showed that, in terms of the development of soft skills, Czech universities provide a very homogenous service. Graduates of universities have nearly the same level of soft skills, while they can also identify similar strengths and weaknesses. These findings suggest that Czech universities should pay more attention to the systematic development of soft skills.Web of Science181604