By Olufemi Mosaku-Johnson
Recently, the Nigerian government gave a directive to all higher education institutions, to make entrepreneurship education compulsory.
Right assessment of the current state of entrepreneurship education provision in higher education in Nigeria is abysmally low there is the need urgently to navigate a way on how a new model of partnership between university, industry and public sector stakeholders can facilitate improved delivery and better outcomes of their programmes.
We will be drawing from the Triple Helix theory to propose a new conceptual framework to examine the prospects and opportunities for multi-stakeholder co-creation of entrepreneurship education.
If this is not done as a matter of urgency, Nigeria will not be able to withstand its continental competitors.
Apart from Covenant University, which has had some considerable success in the delivery of entrepreneurship programmes most higher institutions are lagging behind.
This is not acceptable at this time of our national development. Every education now should be geared and focused on industry-relevant otherwise it is as useless as worthless.
There is an urgent need to look at the collaborative approach to entrepreneurship education design and delivery, and support the emergence of new entrepreneurial universities that are better equipped for both knowledge production and knowledge capitalisation and utilization.
The organization and management of the university technology transfer scheme should be on the front banners.
Mechanisms for increasing technology transfer between universities and industry have come to the fore rapidly in the developed nations as institutions of higher education have become much more entrepreneurial.
The economic implications of these activities have received substantial attention and the sociological aspects of this process have been vigorously embraced viz a viz the effect of university-industry relationships on academic integrity.
Huge considerations have to be given to the successful organization and management of these emerging university ‘service’ units. The observation of organization, management, and perceived performance effectiveness of university technology transfer units leaves much to be desired in our Country.
Attention has to be given to innovative management and governance, licensing and patenting of inventions,
commercial applications for university research, small business development centres and incubation and entrepreneur villages in the campuses providing technical or managerial assistance to entrepreneurs or small businesses, research and technology centres, department operating or participating in facilities for the development of new technology, incubators units managing facilities in support of new technology-based businesses and investment/endowment initiatives utilizing the university’s financial resources for equity in start-up businesses.
The need for research for university management and government policy cannot be emphasized too emphatically.
The role of universities, as the cradle for talents and knowledge development, has long been neglected by scholars, especially in emerging economies like ours.
Many of our scholars are entrepreneurially illiterates who could not convert their knowledge to skill or invention. In addition, the roles of startups and incumbents, as a channel through which the knowledge could contribute to the economic growth in transition economies, have not been well-understood in our higher institutions.
There is an urgent need to fill these theoretical and practical lacunas by examining the effects of university-industry linkages (including university technology transfer (UTT) and university-industry collaboration (UIC)) and enterprises’ activities (including startups and incumbent competitiveness (IC)) on economic growth in Nigeria.
We found that if we didn’t take advantage of this important assignment, we will continue to record negative economic growth in fixed effect and there will be no significant impact in fixed-effect and our economy will perennially suffer. Startups and U & l both affect economic growth positively, and have a greater effect on both estimations.
The effects of university-industry linkages and entrepreneurship on economic growth in our country show heterogeneity. Theoretical and practical implications need to be addressed.
Observation in Nigeria depicts that the University´s participation in innovation projects is low. The perception about organizational factors to collaborate with industry is negative.
As they consider university a domain of just theory that has no relevance to the real world. The students are also considered unemployable and the lecturers are bereft of real-world knowledge.
Data also shows that lecturers consider it complicated to establish a relationship with the industry and are at loss to cross-fertilize ideas with the industry.
In addition, there are gender influence issues concerning the university-industry collaboration
Nigeria faces critical social challenges: corruption, inequality, mediocrity, ignorance, squalor, extreme poverty, malnutrition, high infant mortality, low life expectancy rates and low-quality indicators in schooling.
These problems can be related to economic, political, social and other factors that exacerbate this situation, such as the limited investment in science, technology and innovation and the lack of clear education policy models.
To this effect, there is the need for the construction of a network of interaction channels between higher education institutions, public research centres, researchers and firms, otherwise, the entire system will not develop skills and capabilities to enhance innovation, technology and competitiveness.
In this case, strong research projects and the transfer of their outcomes are pivotal, with structural and organizational barriers that arise from bureaucratic management in universities with low interaction between researchers and the productive sector must be obliterated.
In addition, knowledge supply and demand are still weak and whereby a limited number of agents participate in knowledge exchanges.
The university systems are too shy and at loss to interact meaningfully with the industry.
Therefore, there must be a well-thought plan to explore the university-industry collaboration in universities and higher education in Nigeria.
All hands must be on deck to invest and invent key factors influencing the activities of collaboration and transfer of knowledge and technology in the context of higher institutions in Nigeria.
In addition, we have to into the area that contributes with relevant evidence of gender influence to the field of university-industry collaboration.
Much in line with what has been happening in developed economies for the past few decades, policy decision-makers and industry strategists in Nigeria have to engender dedicated increased attention to initiatives that foster University-Industry Collaboration (UIC).
The overarching goal is to enhance the capabilities/efficiencies of innovation systems, leveraging the role of universities as generators and disseminators of valuable knowledge, highly concentrated in academia in our otherwise laggard nation.
There is the need to enhance the extent to which institutional openness in universities is encouraged towards UIC linkages in other to affect the generation of knowledge-intensive spin-offs and academic patenting activity in the context of our country.
We need to employ knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial projects related to academics receiving grants, as well as international patenting behaviour for our universities and research institutes. Additionally, we have to gather data for UIC activity to ensure its buy-in, ownership and sustainability.
The main novelty of this approach is to qualify UIC according to three different dimensions of openness, focusing on UIC levels and objects of collaboration.
The quality of linkages, collaboration and cooperation will portend a stronger predictor of university entrepreneurship and enhance the extent to which universities are connected to firms.
University-Industry Collaboration networks are increasingly significant to national economies. Though there have been identified barriers and enablers of University-Industry Collaborations, however our understanding of the evolution of such collaborations is highly needed to remove restrictions and increase our ability to nurture their development.
We also need to consider a range of perceived barriers and enablers through four emergent evolutionary phases: embryonic, initiation, engagement and established.
Another issue is that of trust; strong fear of knowledge leakage, and reluctance to share in the embryonic phase evolve into achieving integrity-based trust and an intellectual property agreement in the engagement phase. These barriers can be overcome by using a range of phase appropriate mechanisms, for example, prior experience of the partners was critical in the embryonic phase, while cohesiveness and knowledge complementarity were vital in the engagement phase.
There is indeed a need for public funding and its distribution among members to support industry evolution and competitiveness.
It should be noted that strong collaboration between university and industry, should be supported by state intervention, which is critical to improving state and national systems of innovation and driving economic development.
Realistically, the performance of an industry is impacted by how well its network of collaborators is managed.
Firms are increasingly turning to external sources to acquire the technical knowledge they need to introduce product and process innovations.
Networkings are one mechanism through which organisations share knowledge and generate innovations effectively and efficiently, based on interactions between university and industry technocrats who are working to translate academic science with commercial potential toward market applications.
Conclusion:
Universities should increasingly engage in collaboration with external networks involving other universities as well as industry participants.
These collaborations are a source of financial gain for universities and firms in addition to providing stimulus for economic growth using B2B and B4B models.
This will ensure the promotion of innovative product development leads to sales growth in the market. However, despite the obvious benefits for both industry and university, success is not guaranteed, and many University-Industry Collaborations (UICs) experience tensions that impede successful collaboration, leading to less effective technological diffusion
Cultural and vision differences between universities and industries also result in differing approaches to research. Universities are interested in research that creates and disseminates new knowledge and may require longer development horizons, while industry generally requires more focused research that seeks to exploit knowledge as quickly as possible
Given their differing orientations and the degree of knowledge dispersion produced through collaborations, the industry is often in conflict with university researchers over research topics and the timing and disclosure of results, overcoming these and other challenges is critical.
Finally, the differences in motives, incentives, and organizational cultures between industry and universities should be curtailed with an understanding of the underlying mechanisms of U–I interaction through frequent social interactions and intermediaries (i.e. technology translators), which also help to reduce opportunistic fears and develop calculative trust. Individual and organisational trust is critical in UICs.
The institutions must capture the distinctive phases of relationship development for the long-term evolution of collaboration mechanisms and benefits.
Also, there is a dire need for a surge of research on the innovation potential of in inter-organizational business networks, research on strategy, and attention to the resources resulting from membership or participation in networks which will facilitate collaboration to enrich overall expertise and access unique resources such as technology, knowledge, and capabilities which involves careful navigation of barriers and optimal use of enablers.
The resulting UIC “allows firms and universities to tap into complementary skills of each other and thus potentially help with saving cost and enhancing research outcomes.
Successful UICs involve lower research and development costs, generate higher levels of innovative output, and ROI and have a greater capacity to commercialise academic and intellectual property (solving projects (McKelvey et al., 2015).
However, despite the range of different kinds and scales of projects, the primary purpose of UICs is to generate new knowledge (Petruzzelli, 2011) or to re-combine/re-discover existing knowledge (Butcher & Jeffrey, 2005), particularly in science and technology where universities act as explorative organisations and industry partners act as commercial catalysts.
Based on the foregoing, three enablers/barriers categories have been identified viz demographics, attitude, motivation), and there is the need for the following support: Organizational (IT support, Leadership department climate, University/Department quality), and Institutional (scientific discipline, regulation public policy).
Also identified are the key themes across six different projects, namely project management skills (i.e., objective setting, progress monitoring, effective communication and deploying only trained, high-quality project managers to run the collaboration); trust, commitment, and continuity; the capacity to flexibly adapt to changes in strategy or project direction (because collaborations tend to be influenced by external factors such as corporate instability); and that an appropriate balance between academic objectives and industrial priorities (with particular care being taken in defining the role of student barriers to technology transfer, misalignment of objectives between academic researchers and potential industrial partner, IP conflicts, lack of recognition and reward for academics engaging in UIC activities, all these as barriers must be obliterated together with the risk of free-riding, opportunism, misappropriation of technological and strategic knowledge.
Olufemi Mosaku-Johnson
Mpp, PhD, MNIM, MITD, MCIPM, FCGP, FCE, ACIS
FOUNDING CEO
HUMAN ENTERPRISE RESOURCES AND OUTSOURCES ( HERO)
