Professor Sitti remarked they also created incentives for interdisciplinarity, but wanted to ensure people were not penalised, especially if they were on tenure-track and expected to make contributions in their own field while collaborating in another. “These are things that you should not use against them,” he said. He is also working to establish think tanks at Koç University to identify research topics with potential for globally important breakthroughs. Getting the right people in place will be important. “The big challenges for interdisciplinary researchers are that they need to have motivation and incentive, and they need enough knowledge together so they can discuss topics of mutual interest.” How to recognise and reward innovators on staff was another concern raised by Professor Eng Chye Tan, President of the National University of Singapore, who cited the example of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Both men were PhD students at Stanford University when they developed the basis of Google and published a research paper about it. “Imagine that they were assistant professors, you’re likely to give
them leave to start a company. But would you promote and tenure them?” he asked. Dr Khosla emphasised that they would certainly do so at UC San Diego and they are in the process of changing policy to reflect this. Professor Ip said it is important to incorporate such work into evaluation criteria, but this requires a change of culture and will take time. “We should not stick to the traditional way of counting research papers. This change will happen, but we need more examples to convince colleagues of it,” she said. Professor Nawangwe cautioned that such innovation may not be a clear-cut issue and academic publication must still matter. Nonetheless, publishing itself also gives rise to concerns. Professor Banchong Mahaisavariya, President of Mahidol University, questioned why the focus is always on positive results when there are lessons to be learned from negative results, too. “As a wise man said, success is a lousy teacher, failure teaches you more,” he remarked. Professor Sitti agreed but noted there is no mechanism for feeding back negative results. Professor
Ip noted that reflection on challenges is very useful in entrepreneurship and it is the norm for entrepreneurs to share their experiences. “For academic research, I do think that we have to incorporate that in our evaluation criteria, but it really takes time,” she said. Another question related to papers, raised by Professor Rocky S Tuan, Vice-Chancellor and President of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, was the rise in fake papers and how to counter that. Dr Khosla thought the problem was small in the scheme of things and the effort and resources expended to counter it might not be worth it for the results achieved. Professor Nawangwe shared that people at his university were so keen to publish in order to get promoted that they fell victim to predatory journals. The university took a strict line on this. “If they bring those papers for promotion, they’re rejected, even if they might be good papers. If they publish in predatory journals, they lose out.” A final, pointed question was asked by Professor Dawn Freshwater, Vice-Chancellor of The University of Auckland, who is concerned about the nature and definition of scholarship, particularly in the context of balancing papers and products. “Scholarship is often defined by its dissemination. What we are talking about here is a significant change to dissemination and how we’re assessing our academics in terms of that dissemination. How is scholarship going to continue to be defined? How are we going to talk about that as the compelling narrative about public good and create public trust? We need to ensure we advance a strong narrative around the public good of the university. It is through this that we will maintain momentum,” she conveyed. Dr Khosla welcomed the observation and added that in the context of moving technology or science from the university to the marketplace, the market determines if something is useful. “On the scholarship side, there is also a marketplace for that: it is your peer group, your review team, who accurately determine whether whatever you’ve written is worth publishing or not. A body of those papers constitutes your record in scholarship, and then everybody can evaluate if that is adequate or not. So if a system like a university is true to its goals and mission, the filtering process is already happening. The reason we’re successful is we have a diversity of mechanisms for quality control, it is not a single definition of quality,” he said. The panel’s discussions highlighted the tensions and complementarities between academic research and commercialisation. The creation of new, truly innovative
products relies on the efforts of academic research, which is assessed through a serviceable system of peer review. But universities now are increasingly being asked to translate those findings and contribute more and more to innovation that benefits the wider community. The panellists recounted how they are taking on board that demand through measures such as entrepreneurial education, partnership with industry, and the promotion of interdisciplinarity to solidify their role as creators and leaders in innovation. Nonetheless, challenges remain in breaking down disciplinary boundaries and recognising innovation in staff promotions and rewards. Universities should also be cautioned not to put too much faith in generating significant income from innovations.
Fundamental research enables long- term, high-risk topics that can have more drastic impact in science and society. We should not give up on fundamental research, whose major outcome measure is still publications.
Professor Metin Sitti President, Koç University
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