When you’re looking to innovate, it’s useful to have a good understanding of the businesses and technologies that are emerging both in your industry and in related industries. A great way of doing this is to tap into the work being done by researchers at one of the hundreds of universities around the world.
Suffice to say, the job is not for the feint hearted as thousands of papers are published every day, making it challenging to find the research that could make a real difference to your business. Whilst there have been a number of tools developed to try and help you navigate the research environment, I’m still not convinced that they are quite there yet.
This was reflected in a recent project highlighting the State of University-Business Cooperation (UBC) in Europe. The study, which was the largest study of this type in Europe, came to a number of conclusions about the sector.
- Outputs remain under-developed – whether it’s commercialization of R&D or startup creation by the student body or faculty, universities are not doing enough to bring their expertise to market.
- Variable motivations – it perhaps goes without saying that the different stakeholders have different motivations. For instance, the university sector are primarily concerned with funding, academics with research reach, and business with knowledge acquisition. The best collaborations unify these three aims.
- Mutual understanding is key – good collaboration also requires a bridging of the conceptual divide between business and academia. Universities need to professionalize more and develop strategic programs to manage their relationships with business.
- Proximity matters – despite operating in a globalized world, collaboration requires various things for which proximity helps. These include trust, mutual commitment and a shared goal.
- Entrepreneurship education is lacking – neither students or faculty are given the skills required to launch new ventures to bring their ideas to market.
Suffice to say, some universities do significantly better than others. A good place to start might be the recently published Reuters Top 100: Europe’s Most Innovative Universities, which aimed to highlight the most innovative universities in Europe.
The league table has been put together by the IP & Science division of Thomson Reuters so it has an inevitable focus on things such as the number of patents produced by a university alongside nine other metrics, including the number of academic papers published.
Or you have a study that set out to discover the most influential universities across a wide range of metrics. The project aims to overcome some of the challenges inherent in ranking universities from around the world, such as the general Anglicization of publication, and the focus on research vs teaching.
It uses the Pagerank algorithm made famous by Google to create a map of links between nodes to determine their importance. So, in this context, it looks for mentions of a university throughout Wikipedia, and uses this to determine its influence.
The process was applied to 24 different language versions of the site, which collectively cover 59% of the worlds population and 68% of the total number of articles.
The team remind us that the rankings for each language do tend to favor universities from those countries, so the French list features 32 French universities, whilst the German list features 63 German universities.
Whilst there are some similarities between the two lists, there are also some distinctions, but either way, they may give you a bit of insight into the kind of universities you might want to start building a relationship with.
