Tag: innovation
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Minister Bruton’s Eduprenairship
Last week the government launched a plan. An education plan. Like all plans, it should be taken with enough salt to preserve a whale, but plans are needed if only to know what we should be doing. But plans should be coherent. A close examination of the plan suggests some worrying trends. We are creating an…
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Disruptive Innovation and Irish Universities post-Leporte
History and business are rarely taught or even studied together. That’s a pity. Economic history, as subject, has disappeared down the memory hole. What is more worrying perhaps is that the methods of historical analysis, careful source text reinterpretations, critical data analysis and a cool analysis, are not often applied to business. Enter Jill Lepore,…
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Knowledge Transfer Ireland – Give it away, give it away now…
The Irish Times has today printed a laudatory, uncritical, advertorial on Knowledge Transfer Ireland. It is to me a thousand word puff piece, which contains little hard facts, no analysis, and little news. There is one piece of news, to which I will come. The piece reads, and may be, as an extraction and repackaging,…
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Universities, Business and the Public Good
This is a version of an opinion piece published in the Irish Independent 19 December, co-authored with Ronaldo Munck “Clearly, the education system fulfils a vital role in society that extends well beyond the utilitarian one of satisfying enterprise’s needs for skills or research. Universities are obviously a vital public good, making a crucial contribution…
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Is there any point teaching innovation and entrepreneurship given the state of irish universities?
The web summit having come and gone, innovation and entrepreneurship are again at the forefront of the government and media attention. We have moved without much if any debate, to an apparent consensus that Irish universities and third level colleges must be the engine of innovation in the economy. The reality is however that it…
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Complements or Substitutes? The Role of Universities and Local Context in Supporting the Creation of Academic Spin-offs by Riccardo Fini, Rosa Grimaldi, Simone Santoni, Maurizio Sobrero :: SSRN
Theres a rush to start universities on the road to fostering innovation and commercialisation. This is odd given that we, like every country, have an existing plethora of support already. The paper below suggests that the effect of university support may be very mixed and in fact may simply substitute support not add to it.…
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Universities cannot lead innovation when they themselves are all but impervious to innovation
I really despair at times around the rhetoric in the university space. The meme at present is innovation. We are to be the engines of innovation, creating and educating a generation of innovators, leading to an Ireland that is the land of innovators and entrepreneurs. And yet, within the third and fourth level sector, for…