Open educational practices in Australia: a first-phase national audit of higher education

For fifteen years, Australian Higher Education has engaged with the openness agenda primarily through the lens of open-access research. Open educational practice (OEP), by contrast, has not been explicitly supported by federal government initiatives, funding, or policy. This has led to an environment that is disconnected, with isolated examples of good practice that have not been transferred beyond local contexts. This paper represents first-phase research in identifying the current state of OEP in Australian Higher Education. A structured desktop audit of all Australian universities was conducted, based on a range of indicators and criteria established by a review of the literature. The audit collected evidence of engagement with OEP using publicly accessible information via institutional websites. The criteria investigated were strategies and policies, open educational resources (OER), infrastructure tools/platforms, professional development and support, collaboration/partnerships, and funding. Initial findings suggest that the experience of OEP across the sector is diverse, but the underlying infrastructure to support the creation, (re)use, and dissemination of resources is present. Many Australian universities have experimented with, and continue to refine, massive open online course (MOOC) offerings, and there is increasing evidence that institutions now employ specialist positions to support OEP, and MOOCs. Professional development and staff initiatives require further work to build staff capacity sector-wide. This paper provides a contemporary view of sector-wide OEP engagement in Australia—a macro-view that is not well-represented in open research to date. It identifies core areas of capacity that could be further leveraged by a national OEP initiative or by national policy on OEP.</p

Does New Zealand have an innovation system for biotechnology?

While there is a large and growing international literature on economic aspects of biotechnology innovation (e.g. work by Carlsson, McKelvey, Orsenigo, Zucker and Darby) these studies concentrate on the United States and Europe. The New Zealand biotechnology industry may be expected to develop along a different trajectory as a consequence of a markedly different set of initial and framework conditions. This paper presents the results of an ongoing study that aims to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge of innovation processes in New Zealand while using the international literature as a benchmark. The size and structure of modern biotech activity in New Zealand is described and compared to other OECD countries using biotech patent data and results from the New Zealand and Canadian biotechnology surveys. The paper then focuses on factors affecting innovation in biotechnology; framework conditions, government policy R&D funding and the role of networks and other linkages

Knowledge hubs and knowledge clusters: Designing a knowledge architecture for development.

With globalisation and knowledge-based production, firms may cooperate on a global scale, outsource parts of their administrative or productive units and negate location altogether. The extremely low transaction costs of data, information and knowledge seem to invalidate the theory of agglomeration and the spatial clustering of firms, going back to the classical work by Alfred Weber (1868-1958) and Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), who emphasized the microeconomic benefits of industrial collocation. This paper will argue against this view and show why the growth of knowledge societies will rather increase than decrease the relevance of location by creating knowledge clusters and knowledge hubs. A knowledge cluster is a local innovation system organized around universities, research institutions and firms which successfully drive innovations and create new industries. Knowledge hubs are localities with high internal and external networking and knowledge sharing capabilities. Both form a new knowledge architecture within an epistemic landscape of knowledge creation and dissemination, structured by knowledge gaps and areas of low knowledge intensity. The paper will focus on the internal dynamics of knowledge clusters and knowledge hubs and show why clustering takes place despite globalisation and the rapid growth of ICT. The basic argument that firms and their delivery chains attempt to reduce transport (transaction) costs by choosing the same location is still valid for most industrial economies, but knowledge hubs have different dynamics relating to externalities produced from knowledge sharing and research and development outputs. The paper draws on empirical data derived from ongoing research in the Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University and in the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, supported by the German Aeronautics and Space Agency (DLR).

COMPARING EXPERIENCES IN REPORTING INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL IN UNIVERSITIES

The paper focuses on the intellectual capital (IC) report in universities, a relevant theme actually for the growing interest in applying an IC approach in managing universities. The paper compares the experiences in reporting IC of two different university institutions, the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and the Austrian Universities, to highlight pros and cons of the two different IC models employed. In order to compare these two experiences, firstly we analyzed, through a literature review, the state-of-the-art in measuring and reporting IC, then we focus on the IC measurement models used as framework by the two institution, finally we turned our attention to the IC reports issued by the two universities. Both experiences presented refer to advanced IC measurement models, but both suffer of some limits in applying the models in practice. Like all measurement and management systems that deal with knowledge-based processes, Austrian and UAM's IC reports face the methodological problems of measuring non-physical processes and outputs. In detail, Austrian IC reports lack of qualitative indicators, UAM's IC report lacks of efficiency-related and activities-related indicators.The main research limit is that the theoretical comparison has been carried out on two experiences, due to the lack of awareness of IC relevance in managing universities. The establishment of an ad hoc IC measurement model for universities could have both internal and external benefits. As regards the policy implications, Government, ranking universities by their IC, can get information about their strengths and weaknesses and using it to reallocate resources. This study contributes to broaden the research community's understanding about a relevant management (internal) and communication (external) universities' tool, the IC report, through the examination of two real life European universities experiences in disclosing intangibles. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that focuses on comparing the two best university practices in reporting IC.Intellectual capital, universities

Improving industry science links through university technology transfer units: An analysis and a case.

Connectivity has become one of the critical success factors in generating and sustaining high-performing National Innovation Systems. Industry Science Links (ISLs) are an important dimension of this connectivity. Over the last decades, multiple insights have been gained (both from theory and practice) as to how 'effective' ISLs can be fostered through the design and the development of university-based technology transfer units. In this paper, we document and analyze the evolution of 'effective' university-based technology transfer mechanisms, towards a matrix structure allowing an active involvement of the research groups in commercial exploitation of their research findings, while specialized supporting services like intellectual property management and business plan development are centralized. We show that the establishment of:(1) an appropriate context within academia;(2) the design of stimulating incentive structures for academic research groups and,(3) the implementation of appropriate decision and monitoring processes within the interface unit itself, are critical elements in fostering 'effective' linkages between industry and the academic science base.Decision; Factors; Industry; Management; Matrix; Processes;

Performance factors for successful business incubators in Indonesian public universities

Measuring the performance of business processes is already a main concern for both faculty and enterprise players, since organizations are motivated to reach the productivity stage. Employing a performance achievement framework for the relationship between business incubator success factors will guarantee connection with commercial schemes, which support a high level of performance indicators in successful business incubator models. This research employs a quantitative approach, with the data analyzed using the IBM SPSS version 23 and Smart PLS version 3 statistical software packages. Employing a sample of 95 incubator managers from 19 universities which geographically located in Indonesia, it is shown that the image of business incubator factors has a positive effect on incubator performance. The study investigates the relationship between incubator performance and business incubator success factors in Indonesia. It was found that IT, as part of the business incubators’ facets/abilities, partially supports their performance; that the entry criteria directly support the performance of the incubators; that mentoring networks also support the performance, with good infrastructure systems as a moderating factor; that funding supports the performance of business incubators, also with good infrastructure systems as a moderating factor; and that university regulations and government support and protection enhance the performance of business incubators, with credits and rewards as a moderating factor. In addition, a variety of indicators from the local context affiliate positively to promote a community that highlighted the incubators’ strategies.N/

At stake with implementation: trials of explicitness in the description of the state

We develop the notion of "trials of explicitness" as a conceptual instrument for the study of the state from a pragmatist, sociological angle. We present results from an empirical case study on how state practitioners (i.e. actors in charge of expressing, evaluating, executing or reforming the action of the state) confront the problem of the clarification of the agency of the state. We focus on the implementation, from the early 2000s onwards, of a reform of public management in France which called for a revision of the description of the perimeters and achievements of the action of the state. The reform targeted the rules governing the budgetary process and included, along with new accounting methods, new forms of reporting and assessment aiming at identifying the performance of governmental and administrative action. We consider the implementation process as a set of trials of explicitness in which a number of state practitioners struggled to elucidate the meaning of the reform and to flesh out its orientation. We analyze, using archival material, a number of such trials in the domain of national science and research policy.Science and technology studies; science and technology policy; political sociology; government; France; LOLF; performance; New Public Management; statistics

University Innovation and the Professor’s Privilige

Publisher PD