Tag: dialogue

Exploring the gaps between universities and industries

When working on technological change and the improvement of innovation systems, the topic of the different gaps between universities and industries often comes up. This is true for South Africa, but also for my work in Europe and Asia. The gaps are described differently by development projects, academics and business people, and my job is to usually figure out where the opportunity to close these gaps lies.

In my experience of trying to close some of these gaps, it is important to be as specific as possible about nature and maybe even the effects of these gaps. It is important to go to businesses and to find out what they expect from universities, while also going to academics and researchers and finding out what they expect from the industry. Often, the expectations expressed by these two groups are unreasonable and hard to reconcile. Sometimes people are simply wrong about what they think is needed or should be done.

However, these different expectations are not the biggest obstacle to closing the gap. Often the bigger obstacle is a lack of imagination of what is even possible in terms of cooperation, interaction and information flow. This is made worse by low levels of trust by one side of the other side. Also, stakeholders often have little insight into how others value certain interactions and information flows.

Over the last 14 years I have worked occasionally with a Faculty of Engineering at a University of Technology. In the image below, I share some of the different interaction patterns that we have observed over the years of closing gaps between selected departments or technology centres and industries. I am grateful to Dr SJ Jacobs who agreed that I can share this illustration.

The possible different relations between universities and industries

Of course, some relationships are more important than others. Also, not everybody agrees with the direction of the arrows that I have used in the diagram. I also know that some academics find it hard to believe that they can learn from industry. At the same time, many business people are surprised when they realise that their own companies have learned through the personal relations of their employees with their alma mater.

Even if a certain relationship adds little value in the bigger scheme of things, for the people directly involved it could mean a lot. For instance, for an engineering student to find an industry project that they could work on as a research project is a big deal, even if this may not be so important for a company or even for the academic department involved. In many post-graduate degrees, students are required to work on a real-life project, which often requires a company to give a student access to their facilities, data, senior management or other resources.

To reflect on the relations between a university and a community or a region would require another picture, but I will do that in a next project.

To be transparent, for many years I have used a simpler version of this map that was developed by the late Jorg Meyer-Stamer in the early 2000s. I include the original map below. I think many of my readers might have seen this map in RALIS (Rapid Appraisal of Local Innovation Systems) training course material or RALIS diagnostic processes.

The original map developed by Jorg Meyer-Stamer

While this original map is still useful to explain the different kinds of interactions between the private sector and a university, I found that we need a more detailed diagram if we want to improve relationships, design new services or improve the performance of programmes.

What do you use to map the relations?

What are some of the common myths or gaps that you come across often when you work on this topic?

Instigating innovation inside organisations and networks

For the last four years I have been working on this idea of catalysing or instigating innovation (take a look at my “thinking out loud blog“). It is about what leaders at different points in organisations or networks can do to improve their systems, products, environments and structures.

Central to innovation is the generation, recognition and exploration of knowledge. This knowledge can be trapped in the minds of individual staff, customers, suppliers or users, or it can be explicit. It can be latent, or it can be in your face but not used.

Another central pillar to innovation is dialogue. By this I mean not just a conversation, nor do I mean communication systems. I mean an ongoing and ever expanding process of change through dialogue – the exchange of ideas, the exploration of concepts, the identification of mental maps, attractors and emergent properties, the breaking down of aggregates and boundaries and the construction of new concepts. Dialogue spans many levels, it functions throughout the organisation and even spills over the boundaries of the organisation into other organisations, cultures, systems and networks.

By combining our research in Mesopartner on complexity and evolutionary thinking, and our experience and practice in promoting innovation within and between organisations, I came up with four frames to instigate innovation.

I describe the four frames in more detail below the diagram. In the diagram the activities are on the left hand side, and the documented strategies and how they are connected are on the right side. You have the read this diagram from the bottom up.

The Instigating Innovation Framework

The first frame is about the interaction between the strategy of the organisation, the business, the unit or the team and the innovation strategy. Many organisations have a business strategy and then a separate innovation strategy. Or they have only a business plan used mainly for financial reasons, and do not spend sufficient time tracking technological change, market change and new paradigms. Ideally the business strategy and the innovation strategy should be tightly interwoven, with the one strongly shaping the other. The more your team innovates in products, processes and business structures, the more innovative your business strategy will be.

The second frame is about how the organisation recognises, generates and leverages knowledge. This is about creating new organisational and personal habits about generating, testing, combining and stretching the use of knowledge. It enables organisations to become more thoughtful, more intentional about learning, exploring and the leveraging of knowledge to become far more innovative. In this this frame the organisation activates its resources and systems to become more knowledge intensive. The result of this frame is a knowledge, dialogue and learning strategy that feeds into the innovation strategy outlined under the first frame.

The third frame is about developing a portfolio of improvement activities that spans different time horizons, technologies, markets and functions. Many companies already have improvement activities, but because the first two frames are not in place, these projects are often isolated, project driven and to some extent even disruptive. Every opportunity to change something small, to replace something, to move something or to install something should be an opportunity to strengthen the cultural traits that are healthy, and to dampen the organisational habits that are not supporting the business strategy. From this frame we develop operational and functional or unit-level strategies that operationalise and feed back into the two earlier strategies.

The fourth frame is about networks that connects the inside of the organisation with broader knowledge, technology and societal networks. It is about developing and strengthening the knowledge networks and flows within the organisation and to external organisations. Here the organisation intentionally builds the technological capability of external knowledge partners. It is from here that the organisation can support research and development and longer-term scientific thinking. Here the organisation also purposefully engage in trans and multidisciplinary research, where the thinking and knowledge base of the organisation gets stretched. From this frame we develop a network and research strategy that feeds into the earlier strategies.

Over the years I have assisted many organisations to embark on this journey. I have seen at first hand how organisations and teams that have purposefully improved the way they talk to each other have shifted from being followers to becoming innovative leaders. I have seen the power of simple frameworks that allow deep reflection on perspectives, a continuous process of a calibration of ideas that are mixed, re-mixed and tried. I have also seen how managers at all levels and individuals grow in confidence as they feel more acknowledged, valued and fulfilled.

I hope you will take your team on this journey!

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