Social Science Research Council

The rapid expansion of sophisticated manufacturing and service sector activities is transforming the economic landscape across much of Eastern and Southern Asia. This opens promising opportunities for countries and sub-national regions to enhance their relative position in the world economy and to sustain high levels of economic growth. But if this situation gives considerable room for optimism concerning Asia’s development prospects during the coming decades, it also poses daunting challenges. As innovation capability comes to determine opportunities for continued growth and for the creation of quality employment, new institutional frameworks are needed to accelerate the creation of knowledge and to help diffuse knowledge as widely as possible throughout the economy and society. In this context, the elaboration of appropriate frameworks for shaping university-industry linkages is among the most pressing tasks facing regional and national governments determined to pursue a “high road” toward economic and social development.

Recognizing the importance and complexity of this institutional challenge, the SSRC is partnering with the Development Economic Research Group at the World Bank in a joint effort to promote research exploring the nature and scope of university-industry linkages in Eastern and Southern Asia. We are especially interested in the multiple institutional forms that facilitate connections between university-based research and training and the emergence of knowledge intensive “clusters” of economic activity in metropolitan areas. After all, the region’s future depends crucially on its insertion into high value-added manufacturing sectors (traditional as well as high tech), creative industries, and knowledge intensive business services, and these sorts of economic activities develop most rapidly when concentrated in geographic proximity to one another. Such industries are skill-, and in most instances, research-intensive, and their dynamism depends upon the availability of a significant pool of well-trained workers and technical and managerial personnel who combine specialized knowledge and creative problem-solving capabilities. Each of these attributes can be promoted through enterprise linkages to research-oriented universities—public or private—which constitute the life blood of innovative industrial clusters, in Asia as elsewhere, in developed and developing economies alike.

Research on advanced economies has established clearly that world-class universities enlarge and continually renew the pool of skills in the communities where they are located by attracting students and scholars from across the nation and indeed from around the world. The pool of skills they generate—and in the most successful cases help to retain within a metropolitan region—can be the basis for local dynamism and economic resilience over the long term. At their most effective, universities can serve as nodes linked to other major centers of learning across the world—contributing to the sparking and diffusion of ideas as well as the circulation of creative talent. More directly, these universities are crucibles where people who will in the future run businesses and do research establish contacts that can spawn industrial networks. In other words, universities that integrate with metropolitan economies can provide the social or network capital through which inter-dependent manufacturing and creative industries flourish and draw in a wide range of supporting business services.

In contemporary Asia, growing public demands for high quality tertiary education combines with these economic concerns to make the expansion of the university sector a pressing matter for public policy. Only a handful of metropolitan areas in the region have succeeded in making their growing universities into full-fledged partners in the development of knowledge-intensive clusters, but the experience of success in developed countries suggests that the rewards for those that find a winning formula will be handsome indeed. Nonetheless, the research that could guide university development and supportive metropolitan as well as national policies in Asia is very thin, despite the fact that clusters of innovative activities have sprung up in China, India, Malaysia, Korea and Taiwan (China) in recent years.

Without a deeper understanding of the potential roles that universities can play in a development strategy based on innovation and knowledge-intensive activities, mechanisms for promoting a metropolitan or regional orientation for higher education institutions will be neglected. Moreover, the likely impact of different institutional mechanisms for promoting successful university-industry linkages in Asia will be insufficiently understood. There is an urgent need to fill this gap, lest national and sub-national policymakers find themselves ill-equipped to frame policies that will foster sustained growth and high quality employment in settings where university-industry ties remain incomplete, and where public demands for higher education have yet to be met.

The research undertaken under the auspices of the SSRC and the DECRG will examine the role that universities in specific urban contexts can play, or are playing, in creating industrial and services-based clusters. Using both cross-country empirical analysis and a case study approach, the research will mobilize scholars from Asia and elsewhere to examine the current configuration of research-oriented universities in the region, survey the state of university-industry linkages, and assess the institutional frameworks that govern relationships between knowledge production and commercialization in different contexts. Our objective is to generate comparative analyses that will inform both the scholarly and practitioner communities, and thus shape research agendas as well as public policies concerned with higher education, development, and economic clusters.

A joint research initiative of the Council and the World Bank Development Economics Research Group is underway to explore precisely these questions. An initial conference took place in May 2005 at the National University of Singapore, at which researchers presented draft case studies and further refined the research agenda. A second workshop took place in Washington in November 2005. A workshop oriented to policy makers is scheduled to take place in Paris the last week of March 2006. A selection of project papers from this workshop will be published as a special issue of World Development. In addition to analyzing the nature of university-industry linkages in each of the 8 countries analyzed in the 13 case studies, the original research we commissioned explores the impact of UILs on the spatial dimensions of economic activity, with particularly attention to the clustering of knowledge-based development in urban agglomerations. For more information on the researchers and cases involved, please see the links to the right.