Written By : Imran Razib
An industry-oriented curriculum has become imperative in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to provide graduates with industrial skills. This has been a longstanding demand, a reality in many developed countries.
According to the Malaysian Higher Education Blueprint 2015-2025, the need for a harmonised industry-academia marriage has been gaining a foothold to engage industrial partners in academic curriculum development.
Such a curriculum is expected to incorporate apprenticeships, skill-based hands-on training, real-life simulations in an industrial set-up and other specialised training programmes.
A skill-based employee is more than a need. A practical solution is to redesign the academic curriculum from the industrial point of view, for the economic sustainability of the country and future generations.
In the long run, economic incentives are largely enjoyed by industrial partners. All high-profile industries have their products’ research and development (R&D) involving university graduates.
Now the question that needs to be asked more carefully is, can a varsity play rather a more versatile role rather than just educate and train?
A successful industrial venture makes an industry self-sustainable. Here, I am focusing only on public universities.
Needless to say, university administrators ask their academicians and researchers to secure external funding for their research — a must to fulfil their key performance indicator.
This may sound like an entirely a different issue. However, I shall make the point to link it with the more versatile role of a university.
The questions are on how academicians would divide their time between teaching and evaluating their students, finding, and writing research proposals with novel ideas, and looking for money to do their research.
Their industrial counterparts in R&D, however, are not engaged in teaching and marking, and on top of that, are hunting for money from external sources.
Given this comparative disparity, can universities adopt strategies to run academia and innovation for commercialisation in parallel? In other words, can a university act like an industry?
To many, the answer would be simple. A university is not an industry.
The question is, why not? Times have changed, and more importantly, we are heading for a “dark era” of an unforeseeable future due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Given the looming economic forecast, university administrators are struggling to squeeze the government treasury for survival and growth, and academicians have fewer options to look for external funding for research.
Therefore, one way to face this challenge is universities can start considering having industries that materialise the innovations into commercialised products.
The University of Malaya Centre of Innovation and Commercialisation at Universiti Malaya, and the IKOP at International Islamic University of Malaysia are the best examples of it.
It is high time to go full force into an industrial venture. All they need is to change the academic mindset — a paradigm shift — to expand their efforts to convert it into a small but full commercialisation of products that are the brainchild of their academic and research staff. Here’s how:
HIRE industrial experts not only to redesign the curriculum, but also to plan for a paradigm shift to run academia and industry in parallel.
CHANGE the mindset of academic administrators to learn and execute “no risk no gain” policy (sounds like the publish or perish policy) to start from scratch, that is, from the idea of an employee to product development.
GO beyond an intellectual property right (or a patent application) or making a prototype to a worthwhile product on the shelf; and,
WITHIN legal boundaries, start producing commercial products that are not limited to the innovative ideas of the in-house academicians for marketing to generate revenue.
If they (industry) can do it, you (university) can do that, too. All you need is to come up with bold strategies.
