THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY ON BUSINESS FOR FUTURE EDUCATION UNIVERSITIES IN THE UK

The Impact of technology on business for future education universities in the uk

The Impact of technology on business for future education universities in the UK

Introduction

Universities exist to generate and disseminate new ideas. These objectives are achieved primarily through teaching students and publishing research. Sometimes there is also an opportunity to transfer technology out to business as a way of promoting the take up of new ideas for public benefit and generating returns for the university to invest back into teaching and research.



Discussion

Universities (and some research institutes and government labs) are the only source of independent, early-stage, basic research. There are numerous sources of later-stage research and development activities in commercial enterprises.

Technology transfer actively supports basic research by aiding its future applications and generating returns for further research. Any activity, which adversely affects the ability of universities to conduct basic research is a bad thing.

In setting the question of how universities in advanced democracies could ensure a healthy future for themselves and for society generally, Ditchley was in fact stimulating a debate on what universities are for and whether they were fulfilling society's expectations of them in a rapidly changing world. Given the extraordinary range of senior experience represented at the table, the debate was bound to confront a variety of opinions and a number of obstacles to easy consensus. As one participant noted, perhaps the vigour and incoherence of the discussion reflected the nature of universities themselves. This Note will attempt to reflect fairly the breadth of issues covered and, perhaps a touch more artificially, the range of coherent conclusions that could be drawn from it. But there was no doubt in anyone's mind that the opportunity to ponder the true value of universities in modern life was a timely one.

A gathering of such powerful academics would not have lived up to character if there had not been at least one problem of definition. We decided, more or less firmly, that we were talking primarily about universities as places where research and advanced education went hand in hand with a solid element of choice and independence as to what was studied, but that our discussions had to be in the context of the wider higher education sector as a whole. Universities were described as centres for the creation, preservation, transmission and transformation of knowledge, going some way beyond the higher-level education of people. As for their role in society, we were reminded that, of the eighty-five identifiable institutions that have survived since the early sixteenth century, eighty are universities; and of the thirteen oldest human institutions still surviving, eleven are universities. This drove home the quality of universities as communities and in the end most participants were satisfied with the description of a university as an “autonomous scholarly community”.

Wisely, we did not spend too much time in trying to describe the nature of global change. No-one was in much doubt that the coming period would pose hard ...