Implications of University-Business Cooperation for Higher Education in a Time of Cybernetics: Emerging Trends and Dilemmas

Abstract

Universities and business collaborate for their own ends that do not necessarily match. While the industry is always profit-driven and practice-oriented with primarily short-term goals in mind, the university focuses on strategic planning, theory development, and long-term goals. University-business collaboration (UBC) has diverse modes or activities among which the most common are: 1) research and development (R&D); 2) mobility of academic staff; 3) student mobility; 4) curriculum development and delivery; 5) lifelong learning. While the focus of UBC is on conducting practice-oriented research, each university and enterprise have their own unique combinations of activities that reflect their goals and needs. All the five collaborative research activities demonstrate different effects with UBC drivers, barriers, and organizational characteristics that are further explored in the article.
 Similar to automation, higher education is in many ways a stochastic adaptive control system, the behaviour of which depends on parameters with unknown values. The system has to perform in order to collect specific values of these parameters. The values are crucial as, once collected, they can be used to alter the system’s performance. Following this logic, we consider the five modes specified above as key UBC parameters, put in their emerging trends as parameters’ values, and consider emerging dilemmas and implications for higher education. The key challenge nowadays is around the adaptability of higher education. More than ever before, educators around the world grapple with the idea of whether and how adaptive the modern university should be to the business world needs in the context of global automation. This article is our attempt to add to a meaningful debate around this topic.