Mandelson vision for active partnerships positive but universities’ role is still to challenge ideas

November 16th, 2009 by Tim Greenhalgh

Guest blogger Lorraine Warren, who is Director of Postgraduate Education and senior lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the School of Management at the University of Southampton, on the latest Government initiative for higher education and industry

Peter Mandelson’s recent ‘Higher Ambitions’ report calls for businesses to be active partners with universities and not passive customers (point 7, page 16, http://www.bis.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/publications/Higher-Ambitions.pdf). This is something that I would endorse strongly, having been a proponent of action research in industry contexts for many years.

My research has benefitted enormously from a range of industry connections, including interventions to set new organisational strategies, Teaching Company Schemes (now redesigned as Knowledge Transfer Partnerships) and latterly, looser internet connections that keep tabs on what leading-edge companies are doing, or planning to do, in the Digital Economy, my current area of interest.

The benefits have been mutual: organisations have benefitted from unfamiliar ways of thinking, or new knowledge; similarly my knowledge has advanced through contact with industry and reflections thereon have led to publications that were richer than they might otherwise have been.

To me, management is an applied discipline. In all of the partnerships in which I’ve been involved, formal and informal, there has been mutual respect, as all the parties concerned had opted in around a set of mutually agreed objectives. My teaching has benefitted too, with student placements and projects enriching the learning experience and further ongoing connections.

But it isn’t all plain sailing. Back in the 1990s, I was involved with introducing a variety of holistic, consultative methods into the workplace as part of the process of new strategy design.

One organisation I worked with had a culture and tradition that was based on hierarchy and they found the approaches quite challenging at times and eventually they only accepted about three quarters of our recommendations.

As I recall, there was a fair bit of pressure at the time to come up with the ‘right’ answer from a managerial point of view, which presented a values clash that took some time to resolve.

Again with student projects, it isn’t always straightforward, as I can’t always match a student to any project - academic projects tend to start at a given time of the year and must last for a specific amount of time to support the student’s progress through their course, which may not meet the needs of the organisation concerned.

So, while I remain a strong supporter of greater industry involvement, we shouldn’t lose sight of the idea that the role of the university in society is not only to reflect industry needs, but also at times to challenge them and to stimulate new ways of thinking that may be geared more to the needs of society as a whole than to business per se. This may not always be popular, particularly in the short term. Universities also enrich society through developing new areas of research where the horizons are long term and the business benefits are uncertain may not be realisable in industry timescales, if at all. Of course, some subjects, such as Classics, may be valuable in developing a particular kind of trained mind that certainly enriches the mix, but may not be seen as having direct business impact.

Another concern is, of course, resourcing. Industry projects, teaching or research, tend to be seen solely at the ‘output’ side, at the project coal-face where the work is carried out. A great deal of ‘invisible’ work goes in to get a student, or a research area up to speed enough to be ready for an industry connection — the background knowledge work, estate overheads, networking, marketing, teaching, course administration, writing and reflection.

It will be interesting to see how industry responds to costing models that reflect that fully!

      

Tags: Digital Economy, Higher Ambition, Lorraine Warren, Peter Mandelson, University of Southampton

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