Abstract
In the triad of academic and specialized research institutions, business, and society blocks, the academic and specialized research institutions domain is naturally expected to be the leader or the principal producers in research and innovation for development (R&I for D). The remaining business and society entities on the other hand are expected to be the target consumers of the products. For production to happen however, the producers need resources, incentives and motivations as factor inputs. The factors may originate in intra-domains for the respective domain’s own use of end results such as it is for business organizations, or across domains for mutual benefits. In turn, the origination of the motives and incentives play a role in defining the relevance of the R&I products such as the emergence of appropriate research for appropriate innovations. It is in the observations of this paper that overtime, R&I in Tanzania is becoming undermined by the decline in the cross dimensional flow, specifically the academic (universities) versus society flow. In fact, apart from the specialized institutions, the academics member of the producer block is increasingly becoming too specialized and servicing its own motives in comparison to addressing societal needs. In this paper, we theoretically challenge the phenomenon and use the functional perspectives of the Triple helix model (THM) of university-industry-government cooperation to suggest for innovative education in enhancement of cross border interactions between university and society.
Highlights
In the general terms, this paper conceptualizes innovation as the generation and adoption of new concepts, the definition upheld in a wide range of literature such as Harryson and Kliknaite (2008) “the ability of organizations to adopt new ideas, processes or products”; or Edquist and Hommen (1999) who express it as a learning process by which “new knowledge is produced or existing elements of knowledge are combined in new ways”
We present the paper‟s opinion that, with its inherent capacities in the conception of Triple helix model (THM) where the government can arrange to sponsor innovations, organize for innovations, or enhance interactions on contractual arrangements through policy tools
The paper espoused the gap in failure of universities to focus research for innovation towards societal needs, while attributing it to the differences inherent in the nature of the motives driving innovations in universities, especially where resources for research are meagre such as private universities
Summary
This paper conceptualizes innovation as the generation and adoption of new concepts, the definition upheld in a wide range of literature such as Harryson and Kliknaite (2008) “the ability of organizations to adopt new ideas, processes or products”; or Edquist and Hommen (1999) who express it as a learning process by which “new knowledge is produced or existing elements of knowledge are combined in new ways”. Innovations are a prime factor for development and cultural evolution. Any development stage determines the trajectory of innovations. For any innovations to be meaningful they have to be relevant to development itself. The main concern of this paper lays in the need for innovative education in the sphere of academics (or universities to be precise). Universities are principally perceived as the key institution in the processes of knowledge creation involving research and innovations (Machumu & Kisanga, 2014). We express the concern in a form of problem scenarios as stated here under
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