Founded in 2001 through a merger of the Association of European Universities and the Confederation of European Union Rectors’ Conferences, the European University Association (EUA) today represents 850 institutions across 47 countries counting 17 million students.
The EUA’s stated mission includes the promotion of policies to strengthen universities’ role in the knowledge society, and to this end the organisation has released a range of reports and case studies as well as guidelines on university and corporate partnerships since 2006.
Beginning with studies on collaborative doctoral programmes, which the organisation considers a first step to technology transfer, or indeed knowledge transfer, the EUA progressed to conducting 25 studies on universities engaging in long-term partnerships with industry, that is for more than five years, looking at how these relationships change over the years.
The EUA has made all its reports and case studies publicly available, providing detailed analysis of its findings in each document. Specifically, the association has endeavoured to identify main trends, needs and structures required by both universities and companies to ensure collaborations between the two are successful, extrapolating policies that would favour co-operation.
Based on its work, the association has been repeatedly invited to sit on expert groups for the European Commission (EC) and other European bodies, discussing its findings and conclusions with policymakers in order to influence legal frameworks.
One document, Responsible Partnering Guidelines, published in 2009, outlined some of the specific challenges of partnerships, noting that in order to guarantee beneficial outcomes for all involved corporations must recognise governments’ goal to have universities play a significant part in research commercialisation and spin-out creation. On the other hand, universities should realise that corporations’ aim is to remain competitive.
It is the final part of the advice that has proven tricky, as governments need carefully to balance the needs of both university and industry and foster innovation with well-planned policies.
Lidia Borrell-Damian, director of research and innovation at the EUA, has expanded on this advice, telling Global University Venturing that a coherence of policies is absolutely necessary to support partnerships. Currently, policies both nationally and regionally often contradict each other for university and industry.
She said policies needed to be harmonised so they fostered, “interaction between research-performing organisations, including universities, and companies so that we can tackle major problems in society, education” and establish “a good internal trade policy”.
This, she added, was the only way for products to be “properly manufactured and distributed according to EC standards”.
While EUA aimed to have these changes implemented, Borrell-Damian admitted it was an arduous journey and short-term thinking often won over long-term considerations, with politicians who tended to look only at five-year plans that covered the term of their government. Borrell-Damian said: “The goal is an ecosystem of research-performing organisations and innovators and investors.”
She used the metaphor of a jazz band to describe how the different policies would need to work.
“This is not like a classic orchestra, with a conductor knowing perfectly which instrument is playing which note. You cannot plan for a research breakthrough, you cannot plan for an innovation breakthrough.”
In fact, policymakers needed to recognise they “can only create conditions for those things to happen”.
Long-term policies are indeed a complex topic, Borrell-Damian said, as “the innovation business based on research and innovation requires policies that leave margins for the unexpected to happen and to be able to capture it and manage it”.
Policymakers should also refrain from encroaching too much, looking instead for settling “things for standardised processes” or nudging “things in a different way”, but must not overlegislate, as that would severely stifle innovation. Only with such long-term policies in mind could politicians then agree on effective short-term policies to tackle immediate issues.
Borrell-Damian illustrated the economic need for a long-term approach, Europe-wide, by citing a figure from Eurostat, the EC’s data collector, showing that in 2012 the EU produced 19.4% of all patents registered that year, compared with the US’s 19.8%.
Yet despite being neck-and-neck in patents, the US is arguably better at marketing its innovations and commercialising its research, while the EU appears to have struggled to exploit its intellectual property at a time when the continent is suffering from the after-effects of a financial crisis and continuing human capital flight.
As Borrell-Damian put it: “If all these 19.4% of patents really make it through, or at least 50%, and produce good value-added products, the growth would be enormous.”
The closeness of the US and EU economies is seen as surprising for two reasons. First, large-scale initiatives, such as the French government’s Satt (technological transfer acceleration company) initiative to set up regional tech transfer offices across the country, are still in their infancy. Second, in the EU, research is more often than not publicly funded, albeit at just more than half US levels and often with less resources than many US institutions that may have endowments of several billion dollars.
Differences between the two economies and legal frameworks produce different approaches to university-industry partnerships.
In the US, for example, there is very little concentration of research-intensive universities, while Europe counts far more such clusters that in turn can facilitate co-operation with companies. Public funding, such as the German Ministry of Economics and Energy’s Exist programme, can stifle competition between universities.
Although the EUA is campaigning for changes, Borrell-Damian was relatively optimistic. “When you look at the rules of the game in Europe, you can see that many co-operations are ongoing and that is a growing phenomenon. You can see how universities and companies are co-operating more and more over time, and not just on research.”
She added: “Normally the entry point is a university and a company coming together because there is a common research ground or a common problem that needs an in-depth approach to research.
And it is here, when universities and companies come to an understanding on the terms, that they can establish a co-operation because it will be fruitful to all in the long run.”
Such partnerships then often lead to internships, professorships and guest lectures, and provide a strong basis for future collaboration. The success of partnerships can then be traced and analysed through an online platform developed by the EUA, dubbed U-B tool, which takes into account 47 factors to generate a report about a collaboration.
European universities, however, are looking beyond partnering to attract corporate sponsorship, to include partnerships to conduct research, share studies, set up joint programmes and commercialise intellectual property.
The EUA encourages such collaboration, although it also assists universities with setting up their own tech transfer offices both by referring to its case studies and reports and by guiding institutions to practices that have worked best for universities operating within a similar legal framework and regional policy.
Borrell-Damian said: “It is very difficult to build new capacity in-house all the time, because the number of topics is exploding, and the numbers of masters is too. One good way to move forwar
d is to establish partnerships with other universities, and clearly commercialisation of their output is not different, because that is one thing universities are less experienced at. Partnering is becoming a good way to tackle the promotion of their research or patent portfolios or intentions to produce patents.”
One example of co-operation between universities is SetSquared, a UK-based partnership involving the universities of Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Surrey and Southampton, which was set up in 2003 to identify and commercialise research. In 2014, SetSquared was selected as the best business incubator in Europe by UBI Index.
According to Borrell-Damian, European universities are perhaps also more idealistic. She said while they are good at recognising research and education themes, economic return can follow other priorities.
She said: “Of course they are worried about funding, but, more than economic return, universities never forget their main goal is education – education for all, not just education for graduates, for masters and for doctorates. And they are very aware that competition in the education field, or the higher education sector, relies on providing good education, and they can only do that if the outcomes of research feed back into the curricula.”
This meant European universities tended to favour value-added partnerships with companies that could share their expertise with students over those that would merely bring a financial return.
The association’s mission outline for 2015 and 2016 calls for increased visibility and impact of its work, its policy recommendations and its project outcomes at institutional, national, European and global levels.
In Europe, the next opportunity to help shape policy starts this month with the next phase of the Bologna Process – a series of ministerial meetings and agreements between European countries designed to ensure comparability in the standards and quality of higher education qualifications.
Internationally, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the US is expected to be agreed given high-level support by the two blocs, with the free-trade agreement expected to be finalised next year. One paper – The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership: European Disintegration, Unemployment and Instability, published by Tufts University last October estimated that after a decade of TTIP, Europe would suffer a net loss of exports, GDP, jobs, wages and government revenue, and push public deficits beyond the limits allowed in the Maastricht treaty.
The Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), encompassing 21 other nations as well as the EU and US, is also on the horizon, with the EUA planning to influence policymakers by providing evidence of the deals’ implications.
In January 2015, the EUA’s council unanimously approved a statement on the TTIP and TISA, which warned: “Higher education should not be transacted within a framework that puts the systems of developing countries at risk from corporate ventures located outside their borders. Developing countries must retain the autonomy to determine how their universities should participate in the growth of international higher education.”
Instead, the EUA called for a greater degree of global governance under a model similar to that of the academic recognition frameworks supported by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. The EUA’s council said: “It is essential that TTIP and TISA protect both individuals’ rights to privacy and universities’ codes of conduct in respect of the openness of scientific collaboration, particularly with regard to the international transfer and secondary processing of data.”
Meanwhile, the EUA is also hoping to set up a foresight initiative, which would consider global societal developments, their impact on universities and the EUA’s role within those changes. The initiative would inform the association’s strategic direction beyond 2015 under its latest president, Rolf Tarrach.
