It is encouraging that groups of South African universities are beginning to develop distinct roles in the higher education system.
The work of academic Richard Whitley points us to a core requirement of such attempts — that a new generation university has to proceed in a way that enhances reputational competition.
That is, all the activities of the university, whether teaching, research or community or industry interaction, must be based on the core scholarship of academics, on their reputations arising from peer recognition, typically through peer-reviewed publications.
This is because more intense reputational competition between the institutions in a national system, together with a pluralistic and flexible system, is a major driver of new knowledge production at a faster rate.
By contrast, systems with low reputational competition and little flexibility display a limited flow of ideas and have limited room for mobility, as academics will not move easily to a university with low levels of reputational competition, and vice versa.
They therefore have little room for changing research programmes quickly in response to new trends. The South African higher education system is strongly differentiated and segmented.
There is a long history of institutions established in different periods for distinct purposes, but the degree and levels of reputational competition between them differ.
There is little articulation, collaboration or work across different types of universities, weakening knowledge flows and the system as a whole.
Such a situation is not desirable or feasible in a country with our development and growth challenges.
If we focus on one role of a new generation university — responding to and interacting with industry — how is it possible to do so in a way that builds the reputational core of the university, that encourages a higher intensity of reputational competition and promotes greater flexibility and plurality across the South African higher education system?
Some forms of interaction with industry lend themselves more to building academic reputations than others. Interaction could be driven by, and be of benefit to, the financial imperatives of both firms and universities, or by their academic or intellectual imperatives.
The challenge for universities is to do a strategic scan of their existing interactions in relation to their institutional mission and goals, and the opportunities they find in their environment, and then decide on an ideal pattern of interaction that can be mutually beneficial for the university and the firm partner.
Consultancies and contracts have their uses, but pursuing too many of these forms, which don’t allow one to build the reputational core of the university by yielding publications and postgraduate students, may have negative effects.
Similarly, the kinds of design, prototyping and testing services a university such as the Vaal University of Technology offers to local industry need to be integrated with long-term research programmes, academic publishing strategies and opportunities for post-graduate study.
Collaboration with industry, facilitated through the likes of the Technology and Human Resources for Industry Programme, and through networking, is more likely to be of benefit to the university in a way that allows for building academic reputation, whether basic, useinspired or applied research.
Based on exist ing data at a national level there are trends that can inform university strategies:
- First, universities are not the most common cooperation partner for firms in their research and development activities. As in other developed and developing countries, other firms, especially clients and customers, are. The scale of cooperation in terms of the absolute number of firms interacting with universities is very small.
- Second, there is a distinct profile of firms that draw on universities for their innovation and research and development activities. Large firms with higher levels of technological intensity are most likely to interact with local universities. The propensity of small and medium firms to cooperate with universities is quite limited.
- Third, there are broad sectoral trends that suggest it will be useful to analyse sub-sectoral and regional trends in greater detail. Universities as knowledge producers are aligned with the technology needs of firms as knowledge users in the traditional resource-based mining and agriculture sectors, particularly in terms of complementing firms’ research and development capacity.
The financial and business services sector appears to be an area of potential competitive advantage in South Africa, but it has a weaker ‘match” with what local universities have to offer, seeking to meet knowledge and technology needs from clients and suppliers locally and abroad, and even foreign universities.
The manufacturing sector tends to have the greatest number of firms that cooperate with local universities for technological upgrading, whether innovation or research and development, but trends at sub-sectoral level remain opaque.
Universities of technology are particularly encouraged to engage with small businesses, and there have been a number of government incentive schemes to promote this.
But just as universities need strategic intelligence about firms to build networks and enhance reputational competition, so they also need strategic intelligence about operations of the national system of innovation in relation to their specific field.
In conclusion, the idea of a new generation university is an exciting one, a positive development in enhancing a differentiated, plural and flexible higher education system in South Africa that is responsive to our social and economic development demands.
The demands are great, they are multiple and they are complex. And there is not any easily available blueprint or best practice on which we can draw.
We are beginning to conduct research on innovation and development in low-income countries, and it is evident that the literature is strongly focused on high-income, developed countries, with an emerging focus on middle-income countries like South Africa.
So we need to engage with the literature on university-firm interaction with care, in order to draw appropriate insights for the conditions and contexts within which we work, to build the new generation university.
And at the core of developing such a new model must be strategies that enhance the reputational competition of the universities.
Dr Glenda Kruss is a chief research specialist in the Human Sciences Research Council’s research programme on education, science and skills development.