05/27/2008

The role of universities in creating efficient tools for generating, evaluating and utilising knowledge

The final session of the conference, presented by Jesús Marí, Director General of Political Science from the Generalitat of Valencia, saw contributions from Guven Yalcintas, Vice President for Technology Transfer at the Research Foundation of the State University of New York (SUNY), and Francisco José Mora Más, the Vice Rector for Financial Planning and Coordination at the UPV and the director of the CPI Foundation. Dr. Yalcintas made some very enlightening comments regarding the process of creative thinking and innovation, while Dr. Mora Más spoke of the importance of creating effective structures to mobilise knowledge.

Go to video of the session

Dr. Yalcintas opened his talk by referring to the common ground between academia and industry. In the case of the State University of New York, this has taken the form of the Research Foundation which supports 64 campus, with some 410,000 students across over 6,600 fields of study. It was founded with the objective of converting research into disclosure, developing intellectual assets, ensuring intellectual property protection and promoting commercial strategies to create licensing agreements. Dr. Yalcintas stressed the importance of creativity, of thinking outside of the box and looking for possibilities in impossible places. He highlighted the idea that anyone is capable of inventing but that the process must be structured and innovative and be motivated by passion and real interest. He also took inspiration from some of the greatest thinkers of out time, namely Einstein and Da Vinci, and offered the following procedure for invention: state the initial problem; decide why it must be solved; define the hierarchy; ignore the limitations; ignore old answers; simplify; eliminate barriers, and ask yourself if the problem is compelling and fun? This last point he considers a must.

The Vice President for Technology Transfer moved on to define what constitutes as success for a university. This, he insisted, is not based on the number of patents but on the value they bring. The focus should be on identifying technologies for the betterment of the world, he stated, and gave some examples of technologies produced at SUNY which have had a positive impact on society. He feels it is essential to be passionate about the partnerships formed with industry and adequately prepare technologies for transfer. Most importantly, he remarked on the need to analyse how we carry out open innovation in order to prepare our scientists to be creative, use workable models, be flexible and be passionate about our technologies and knowledge. In conclusion, he gave his support to the progressive notion of teaching entrepreneurship to children at young age, in his words, we should "teach them how to be like Einstein and think like Leonardo".

Dr. Mora Más, spoke of the role of the UPV in supporting and promoting open innovative through creating an effective internal structure to work towards this goal. He feels it is essential to maintain an open mind and have the ability to unlearn and relearn with added value. He remarked on the role of an enterprising university in contributing to the economic, social and cultural development of the local community, the Spanish nation and society in general, and that this vision should have global relevance in order to build bridges on an international level. He spoke of knowledge capitalisation and the obstacles and remedies that exist therein. The obstacles he named as being fear of risk-taking and reduced funding, disconnection between academia and industry and a lack of focus on commercialisation. The remedies, in turn, he listed as being culture and education, a more flexible funding system, closer links between universities and industries and a system of rewards within universities to facilitate innovation.

The Vice Rector of the UPV made special reference to promoting the entrepreneurial model, with a focus on contact between people and technologies. The key elements to promoting this model are organisation and coordination between research groups to promote multidisciplinarity, the establishment of a research database with commercial possibilities, the development of an internal structure capable of safely transferring intellectual property achieved through research, and the capacity to create companies within the university. He finalised his contribution by speaking of the CPI (City of Innovation), a knowledge-intensive science park, containing research institutes and corporate labs, located next to the UPV campus. It will be developed in different phases and forms part of the strategic plan for the future based on mobilising knowledge and bringing value to industry.