Examination of Witnesses (Questions 500
- 519)
WEDNESDAY 21 MARCH 2007
PROFESSOR TIM
WILSON, MR
RICHARD BROWN
AND MR
RICHARD GREENHALGH
Q500 Stephen Williams: So there is
diversity in the sector, we all accept that, but would you think
that it should be important and core to their mission that all
higher education institutions should have a relationship with
at least their local business community?
Mr Brown: I slightly hesitate,
because the easy answer would be to say, "Yes", but
for a Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University, a council member,
I think that she would say that her market was global, and, yes,
there would be important relationships with business on the Cambridge
Science Park, but they will relate to wherever there is the world-class
need for their world-class products.
Q501 Stephen Williams: Moving away
from the general area of HE business partnership, how would you
define knowledge transfer? Is that something that is different
and more specific and is perhaps done by a smaller number of institutions?
Mr Brown: I think there is an
important general point I might make about knowledge transfer.
Most knowledge is transferred through the movement of people.
That can be students into small companies on placements, it can
be visiting lecturers, professors into universities and it can
be through other ways other than the metrics which we tend to
assume are the relevant things for valuing and rewarding knowledge
transfer. Business start-ups, spin-outs, patents, and all of these
types of things are hard bits of evidence, but that is not the
way most knowledge is transferred. It comes back to our earlier
discussion as to how we can encourage and value the movement of
people, and it is not inconceivable that we could develop metrics,
(and we are working with the Government on this at the moment)
to see how we can value those people flows.
Q502 Stephen Williams: Do you think
there is enough of a transfer in both directions of people, not
just students and academics spending time in industry but the
other way round as well?
Mr Brown: No, there is not, and
there is a greater responsibility on business. It is no good businesses
throwing grenades over the fence—this is back to Mr Carswell's
earlier question about the role of the CIHE partnership—and
saying you are not producing employable graduates but then not
providing the quality work experience and placements that would
help to produce those graduates. Equally, businesses play an important
role in developing and delivering case studies. So, what are some
of the issues that we face in our company or in our sector? How
can I develop some of my management team by persuading them to
go in and deliver some of that and be challenged by bright people?
I think there is a two-way flow, but there is not enough business
engagement with higher education.
Q503 Stephen Williams: Is the economic
relationship a two-way flow, or is that mainly one direction?
Does business benefit far more from the link with higher education
and does higher education miss out on the economic benefit it
should be deriving from its knowledge transfer?
Mr Brown: Businesses only spend
about £250 million with higher education institutions on
research. They spend a similar amount on consultancy, as broadly
defined. That is a fairly small percentage of their own spend
in those areas. So, you might say that, therefore, there is an
enormous additional market that higher education should be seeking
to capture.
Q504 Stephen Williams: Can I move,
Chairman, to Hertfordshire. Does Hertfordshire do this because
you want to do it? Did you go Hertfordshire University and think:
"My mission is to make Hertfordshire different and distinctive
from the rest of the sector and this is going to be my legacy",
or were you recruited on that basis?
Professor Wilson: When I was appointed
Vice Chancellor it was very clearly in my mission, my intention,
but, frankly, Hertfordshire has always been like this. It was
founded to support the aircraft industry, it was founded to train
technicians and it has been supporting the economy in our region
ever since it was founded. The difference now is that there is
an opportunity to be very explicit about our mission, to be very
straightforward and to recognise differentiation in the sector,
which is essential, and to position ourselves as a business-facing
university. If I may refer to your earlier question as well. Richard
is quite right, most knowledge transfer takes place in terms of
people flows, but I would not want to think that is where we need
to focus completely because, if we look at the DTI knowledge transfer
partnership programmes, for example, which are excellent examples
of universities and businesses working together, quite often not
in what you and I might think of as Blue Sky research; I would
class this as incremental innovation—new products and new
processes using university expertise to work with business expertise—it
is not knowledge transfer, it is knowledge exchange, it is knowledge
through working together. And that sort of programme is really
essential for the thriving small business community, and long
may it last.
Q505 Stephen Williams: Hertfordshire
is also taking part in some HEFCE funded programme. There are
four other universities apart from you. You have got a share of
a £4 million pot. Does that mean you have got £800,000
or is it an unequal share?
Professor Wilson: No, we have
received £2million.
Q506 Stephen Williams: So you have
got half of it?
Professor Wilson: No, the pot
is larger than that actually.
Q507 Stephen Williams: Is it?
Professor Wilson: Yes, it is.
Q508 Stephen Williams: It is an extract
from your evidence actually.
Professor Wilson: We have received
£2 million as part of that, we also received another £2
million for our employer engagement, so we have received £4
million.
Q509 Stephen Williams: How do you
invest that public money effectively?
Professor Wilson: We are using
that money to accelerate our strategic development. Richard was
talking earlier about the time to market, the way we can improve
our quality assurance processes. Quality assurance processes can
take two, three, four years. I want to bring that down to three
weeks. If we are going to be responsive to business needs, we
have got to respond inside three weeks, so I have got to transform,
re-engineer, a lot of our processes in order to make us more business-like
and more responsive. That is part of what we are doing, but we
are doing lots of other things. We are making an employment centre
where business needs can be matched with graduate skills, not
a careers advice centre, an employment centre, where we are matching
our student skills to business need, business need generated by
business link representatives, bringing it into the university
and matching that with the skills of our graduates. That is the
sort of thing. It is a whole wealth of activities where we are
using that money and investing it for the future.
Q510 Stephen Williams: In the evidence
you said, in terms of the relative importance of your mission,
that teaching and research is your primary mission and that business
relationship is the secondary part of your mission. What sort
of feedback do you get from your under-graduates or graduate students
about how they feel that balance? Do the students all buy into
this business mission?
Professor Wilson: That is a very
interesting question.
Q511 Stephen Williams: Is that why
they go to Hertfordshire perhaps?
Professor Wilson: First of all,
may I say that we undertake teaching, learning and research in
the context of business. It is the context that matters. We are
a university, we undertake learning and research, but it is in
the context of business. Students who are coming to my university
are very interested in their return on investment. It is not a
cheap experience any more; going to university is a high cost
experience. There is an interest in the return on investment and
the sort of job they are going to get, and what sort of return
they are going to have, and I encourage that philosophy, I encourage
those thought processes. I would like to sit here and say people
come to the University of Hertfordshire because they know they
are going to get a good job when they finish. I cannot say that
at the moment, but I think I will be able to in three or four
years' time, because we have a brand of business-facing, business-like.
The students will come to my university because they want to come
to a business-facing university. Some students do not want that;
they want to study at the highest possible academic level they
can and become researchers themselves. That is fine, but they
should not be applying to my university, they should be going
somewhere else.
Q512 Stephen Williams: We heard earlier
about students increasing their employability by spending time
in industry and vice versa. Does your institution—maybe
one of the Richards could give us some experience from the rest
of the sector as well—mix up the student level, the graduate
level and the student level, say, between a student who is doing
games technology and a student who is doing business, or accountancy
and MBAs and get them to work together in this team, or is it
all linear going out into the business in the same discipline?
Professor Wilson: Yes, that is
one of the pleasures of working in a multi-disciplinary institution:
to put teams together, students and staff, from different disciplines
and see what is created. You can get some real innovation in those
conversations.
Q513 Chairman: You have got an academic
community at Hertfordshire, have you? Your academics see themselves
as a community?
Professor Wilson: It is a mixed
community. They certainly do.
Mr Brown: It is often in the very
smallest institutions in the sector, the sector that is covered
by GuildHE, as it is now called, SCOP as was, where you find a
lot of that interaction where it is almost difficult for individuals
to decide whether they are teaching or whether they are practising,
and students when they are learning or when they are practising.
Also we should not forget the traditional sandwich education which
still exists in the UK—the numbers have been going down
but nevertheless it still exists. Equally within many universities,
and, again, let us quote Cambridge as another example of the Russell
Group institutions, if you are undertaking engineering, in the
engineering course you have to do a placement in a company on
a real-life project. You may want to ask Alan Gilbert whether
that is similar in Manchester, but I suspect it is the same with
a lot of Russell Group institutions. So this is a broadly based
practice. It is not to say that there should not be more of it
and, back to your earlier question, not to say that businesses
cannot play a greater role in facilitating that.
Mr Greenhalgh: If you look at
our report on international competitiveness, you will see that
one of the things that multi-national companies value about UK
HEI is, in fact, the multi-disciplinary team approach compared
to our competitor countries. We are actually good at that, and
we need to continue to develop it.
Q514 Helen Jones: A question for
Tim really. You described your university as business-facing,
you said a lot of your students go there because they want a return
on their investment, but we all know how difficult it is to predict
the labour market well in advance. How do you build into your
programmes the flexibility for those students to be able to develop,
as the world changes, to be able to change careers, change outcomes,
because that is also important, is it not?
Professor Wilson: Yes, I think
you are exactly right, Helen. A lot of this is about developing
soft skills, developing skills which enable students to work in
a different environment. Many of them will change their careers
several times during their lifetime, and developing those soft
skills and self-awareness really is part of a business type university
education. It is not just about the acquisition of knowledge,
it is about the acquisition of skills and the context of that
knowledge and the awareness of those skills, and it is encouraging
and inculcating that confidence and that ability to feel they
can move between different careers as they go forward. You are
right, it is a vital skill for the future.
Q515 Helen Jones: Can I ask Richard
Greenhalgh, what in your view is the role of arts graduates in
this new business world? What is the role of people like me with
English or history degrees coming out of university now? When
I came out a degree would get you a job. Well, it would not actually—when
I came out it was in the middle of the eighties recession—but
generally you could expect a decent job with a degree. What are
going to be the prospects for people doing the arts, because they
do not necessarily want to become researchers but they want to
do that as their first degree?
Mr Greenhalgh: I spent most of
my career with an Anglo Dutch company, Unilever, and I joined
with a degree in social anthropology. I went into marketing and
then personnel with that. My colleagues in the Netherlands were
always amazed that someone with an anthropology degree could go
into marketing, because the accepted wisdom in the Netherlands
was if you went into marketing you were an economist, so do not
think about going in with a degree in English. The positive thing
about the system in this country is that you can go with an arts
degree, obviously not into engineering, and you would not want
your surgeons to have a degree in English, but there are still
plenty of jobs out there for arts graduates. I think the important
thing is, as Tim has been saying, provided your orientation is
there. If you want to go into business and you understand business,
you spend time in business. To some extent the degree is not the
key thing there. The second thing to say is that added to that,
I think in this country we tend to think about research being
only science based, and it is wider than that. We have in this
country fantastic creative industries and design skills where
more and more a research-based approach is actually the right
thing for the companies and the economy.
Q516 Helen Jones: Richard Brown,
how do you think you can convince businesses of the value of that.
You referred to the report that you have just done, but is it
correct to say that many businesses still are not perhaps fully
aware of the skills that graduates in various disciplines can
bring to them? How do you get over that problem?
Mr Brown: I think that is right.
That is why we hope that report will be helpful. If I was Chairman
of KMPG or PwC here, I would say the last thing I would want is
someone who has studied accountancy. I want somebody who has studied
English and who has developed those analytical capabilities, because
I can teach them the subject of accountancy. The same would be
true of various other companies in the businesses services sector.
As Richard said, we are special in the UK in that our recruitment
is much more general and we value much more generalists and our
businesses then invest more in their staff and their staff development
than in other countries in Europe; there is research evidence
on this, and I can give you that if that is helpful. So, they
are able to recruit generalists because they invest more in the
specifics of their own organisation and their own disciplines.
Q517 Helen Jones: Can I move on to
another issue. We have discussed in this Committee quite often
the Research Assessment Exercise and the prospect of changes to
it. I wonder if Tim could tell us, does it have implications for
his kind of university business collaboration that you are interested
in? Is it helpful or not?
Professor Wilson: The Research
Assessment Exercise is important for universities like mine, not
really in the context of the money it will generate from it, but
in the context of recognition, status and standing, because that
status and standing gives us leverage to obtain R&D grants
and knowledge transfer partnership grants from different authorities.
So, it is not the money that drives us in the context of our Research
Assessment Exercise, it is the status and standing. What is really
important for universities like ours is to be able to use our
research capability, not in the context of undertaking pure research,
as you will hear later on this morning, but in the context of
the application of existing research into business in order to
enable innovative practice. That is where our real interest lies.
Q518 Helen Jones: There has been
some talk of including output measures in the metrics, but, as
we all know, there are difficulties in getting the design of that
right. Do you think it is possible to get an accurate output measure
for that? How would it change behaviour, or would it not change
behaviour at all?
Professor Wilson: If I may speak
in a HEFCE way here, I think the attitude is that there will never
be a perfect system; it is getting the system as close to perfect
as possible. The RAE, in my view, has served its purpose very
well for two decades; it is time to review it and look far more
at output measures than we ever have done before.
Q519 Helen Jones: Do you have any
suggestions about what those might be?
Mr Brown: I was going to give
a broad perspective, Chairman, on that question. We have said,
in our view, that all forms of research and excellence in research
needs to be valued. That means that the type of applied near-market
research which Hertfordshire undertakes is as valuable as the
type of fundamental research that certain other institutions undertake;
that the user community needs to be involved in giving their views
on what is international excellence, because the views of a BAE
Systems and a Rolls Royce—and we have plotted this against
five five-star departments—of course there will be an overlap,
but in some cases the business view will be different from the
academic peer review view of what is internationally excellent
and we need to be able to support some of those departments that
are really valued by business.
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