Pursuit of IP is ‘a distraction’

"Roger Brown, professor of higher education at Liverpool Hope University, arguing that industry was having too much influence over university teaching and research" Liverpool Hope University? What a joke!! These professors of education who are merely talkers do not know how the outside world works. Aren't these people destroyed our primary and secondary education by talking about education and fancy theories? In any case his university a former technical institute or something and one of the latest to take on the name of university can't do what Mr Sweeeny says. This should be left to Russell Group universities. Some of them are already doing what Mr Sweeney says and more can be done. Leave these professors and universities like Hope on one side to recruit students with questionable background in the name of widening access.

Re IP and Business THis is typical of the snobbery diffused through higher education. Far from being a mere talker, Prof Brown has years of practical experience and ran an insititute which was engaging wth industry right back in the early 1970s when consultancy and industry engagement was frowned upon by the traditional universities. Besides, an attack on the person, Dawkin's style, reveals a paucity of real arguments. The point is that in current times we need wider engagement with industry which focuses on relationship and exchange of ideas, as well as the ability to stand above the credit crisis and provide the long-term leadership, thinking and idea generation which is so often absent from industry.

David Sweeney argues that because actual income earned through IP commercialization is so low, it's a distraction from higher earning areas. Income is however significantly lower than it could be. The main problem is that many IP technology transfer offices are staffed by former academics who have little or no experience of industrial innovation. They know little of the commercial R&D, sales and marketing required to commercialize inventions. Moreover, few tech transfer offices have a budget that is sufficient to sustain these activities. If universities desire to increase their IP incomes, they need to employ experienced professionals and give them sufficient cash to do their jobs. Uncooperative academics also doesn't make the tech transfer role any easier.

Or perhaps an obsession with total control over IP generated by universities is distracting business from the real issues when engaging with Universities?

Roger Brown is absolutely right. The instrumentalist lowest common denominator industrial Digby Jones and Lord Leitch types are wrong. Also wrong are the Oxbridge snobs looking down their noses at industry. What is needed from Higher Education is real challenge to the dehumanising influences of corporate capitalism and the suffering caused by the global economy and our market-obsessed government. A retun to a focus on 'really useful knowledge' about social relations at work, about power imbalances, about control of information, about exclusion, privilege and the greed and selfishness of the powerful. The employer engagement agenda is rubbish - and half of universities operate increasingly to serve the interests of the powerful - EPSRC research grants providing nice platforms of research infrastructure for the private sector to exploit - instead we should only have investment in technology to solve real human problems, to alleviate the suffering of those who have no access to clean water for example - not on the next bloody catalyst for industrial processes, weaponry or more nuclear power. When are people going to wake up?