development among provinces

TABLE 5.3 Priorities for university-industry partnerships at different stages of development among provinces

MORE DEVELOPED PROVINCES

Teaching universities • Participation of industry in curriculum development • Participation of industry in teaching and course delivery • Student internships

Developmental universities • Research consortia and long-term research partnerships • Spinoff companies, patent licensing • Business incubation services

• Entrepreneurship promotion

Source: Adapted from Guimon 2013. LESS DEVELOPED PROVINCES

Improving labor market relevance of undergraduate studies

• Building absorptive capacity to adopt and better diffuse existing technologies • Focusing on appropriate technologies to respond to local needs

• Entrepreneurship education

their national and local economies. Teaching universities in the more developed provinces could invite partners from industry to contribute to the design of university curricula and the delivery of courses. Also, there would be more opportunities for student placements in industry through internship programs. An example of how university student and industry interaction improve the quality and relevance of degree programs in Germany appears in box 5.2.

Developmental universities would mainly be institutions that already contain groups of academics engaged in research and innovation activities. In more advanced provinces, such as Western Province, developmental universities could collaborate with industry to promote entrepreneurship, develop spinoff companies, engage in long-term research and innovation partnerships, and provide business incubation services. In less developed provinces, universities could focus on developing the appropriate technologies for local economic needs, creating an enabling environment for better adoption and diffusion of existing technologies and entrepreneurship education.

Policy initiatives to promote developmental universities could focus on creating an enabling environment for academics to engage in research and innovation and innovation commercialization activities. Universities need a more favorable environment for the promotion of research and innovation (Aturupane 2011, 2016; Larsen et al. 2016). For this, several policy measures are important. The incentives for academics to engage in innovation activities could be increased by recognizing research leading to intellectual property in university promotion schemes. The UBL Cells should be developed to contain technology transfer offices and to create limited guarantee companies that could facilitate the commercialization of innovations. Meanwhile, more space should be created in the work schedules of academics in developmental universities to undertake research and innovation. These universities could also be enabled to establish open innovation spaces and business incubators. Evaluation of developmental universities could include assessing the extent to which their intellectual capital is used for national and regional development. one approach to transforming intangible assets into internal reporting and management procedures is intellectual capital statements (ICSs), which have become widely used in Austria (figure 5.7). The basic idea behind an ICS is to represent the value of an institution’s intangible assets such as knowledge and