Academic Entrepreneurship: A Comparison of U.S. and Japanese Promotion of Information Technology and Computer Science

Manufacturing hardware is increasingly a commodity product with low margins. The reason for the diminished value of hardware is that more and more of the value in high-tech products is contributed by software meeting user needs, through enabling new functionalities and services. Those firms better able to create and use software advances, improve their competitive outcomes. Japanese high-tech firms have been slow to recognize and act on the growing importance of software and have suffered competitively. The reasons are many. It is widely recognized that human capital is a critical component of software innovation and thus would be central to any explanation of Japanese firms’ weakness in software. For this reason, I focus on the role of university engineering education in IT, comparing the U.S. and Japan. My analysis documents the leadership role played by U.S. universities and in particular, the academic entrepreneurship demonstrated by leading computer science departments. The contrasts with leading Japanese universities, the University of Tokyo in particular, are striking. On the Japanese side, they include a slowness in recognizing the importance of software and in adopting state of the art curriculum, a failure of MEXT to regulate the way in which universities implemented their mandate to develop information technology, an egregious sabotaging of the new information technology departments by university administrators, and a reluctance of leading firms to hire computer science graduates. Finally, centralized faculty decision making allowed engineering faculty in other departments to resist changing student quotas (teiin) in favor of the new discipline. Taken together, these factors inhibited the development of computer science as a distinctive discipline and put a break on any faculty entrepreneurs seeking to promote the new discipline. By contrast, I will show how institutional practices in the U.S. acted to promote academic entrepreneurship enhancing the growth of the new discipline

Latin American perspectives to internationalize undergraduate information technology education

The computing education community expects modern curricular guidelines for information technology (IT) undergraduate degree programs by 2017. The authors of this work focus on eliciting and analyzing Latin American academic and industry perspectives on IT undergraduate education. The objective is to ensure that the IT curricular framework in the IT2017 report articulates the relationship between academic preparation and the work environment of IT graduates in light of current technological and educational trends in Latin America and elsewhere. Activities focus on soliciting and analyzing survey data collected from institutions and consortia in IT education and IT professional and educational societies in Latin America; these activities also include garnering the expertise of the authors. Findings show that IT degree programs are making progress in bridging the academic-industry gap, but more work remains

Chair Support, Faculty Entrepreneurship, and the Teaching of Statistical Reasoning to Journalism Undergraduates in the United States

Statistical reasoning is not the same as doing calculations. Instead, it involves cognitive skills such as the ability to think critically and systematically with data, skills important for everyday news work and essential for the era of data journalism. Twin surveys of the chairs of undergraduate journalism programs in the United States, conducted 11 years apart, revealed that those who perceived benefits from statistical reasoning instruction were more likely to reward entrepreneurship (faculty attempts to integrate this instruction into their classes), but with slow gains over time in the fairly small number of such faculty. Being consistent with university goals in statistical reasoning instruction appeared to motivate chairs’ reward decisions in both waves. Increasingly, they took into account what they saw as the general value of statistical reasoning for their students and the competitive edge it could give them in the journalism job market. Perceived constraints to teaching this content had no apparent overall impact on reward decisions

Building Skills and Alliances to Meet Demand in New Jersey's Labor Market

This summary report examines the Ready for the Job initiatve, which profiled the skill and occupational requirements of 73 occupations in New Jersey. This report highlights four cross-industry demand skills: math and technology skills, problem solving and critical skills, communication and teamwork skills, and entrepreneurship and business skills

Advanced marketing education curriculum in secondary schools in Wisconsin

Includes bibliographical references

EU–originated MOOCs, with focus on multi- and single-institution platforms

No abstract available