In recent weeks, there has been an upsurge in media attention on the issue of innovation in higher education. This upsurge continues a long trend in the United States, during times of economic recession, that we focus our media and national mindset on innovative solutions and entrepreneurial thinking. However, unlike past recessions much more focus has been placed on making our larger institutions of higher education more dynamic and innovative in the ways they teach, conduct research, and interact with corporate America.
Higher education, no matter whom you speak with, is one of America’s greatest competitive advantages and is reflected in rankings which place 75% of the global top 150 universities inside the United States. Since the early seventeenth century, when what is now Harvard College was opened, America has been fostering a strong independent system of higher education that has allowed the United States to garner a highly talented workforce, the best educated professors, and world-class research partnerships between educational institutions, government and corporations. College is a part of American life, a culture that has played a large part in America’s past economic success but our current set of institutions have proven themselves incapable of either preparing students for the workforce or successfully converting laboratory research into commercially viable products. To improve our effectiveness in both areas some innovative thinking and structural changes are needed.
One pair of scholars sounding the alarm, just so happen to be two of Carolina’s finest academic minds, Chancellor Holden Thorp and Buck Goldstein. Together these two have written a book entitled Engines of Innovation: the entrepreneurial university in the twenty first century and make the case for large scale change in the higher education mindset to embrace the needs of a changing and dynamic world wrought with problems. They see America’s top tier research universities as large reservoirs of knowledge and human capital which society have invested heavily in but which have, at least as of yet, failed to deliver back fully on that invest. With a combined endowment of more than $250 billion, America’s top Universities are one of the few collective centers that combine the three necessary pieces for commercial growth; capital, knowledge, and novel solutions. Thorp and Goldstein argue that by tapping into this network of knowledge, America can mobilize itself, like it did for the Apollo missions, once again to solve the world’s greatest problems of hunger, violence, climate change, disease, and water.
No matter your presuppositions about America’s public and private higher education system, this book will make you see past them and imagine a higher education institution that truly fulfills its role as an engine of innovation. Check the book out on amazon or www.revupinnovation.com for more information.
