Policy Implications for Government and Higher Education in Pursuing Innovation

摘要

Innovation management and research must be a core element of the mission of higher education. It is a policy directive set by the government, which is often a major source of funding for educational needs in our country. The extent to which higher education institutions are engaged in research and development activities has a key role in determining the status and the quality of these institutions and the contribution, which they make to economic and social development. Otherwise higher education institutions would find it difficult to finance their activities including research and innovation. In modern and globalizing era, a really international world of learning, highly competitive, is emerging. Anyone, representing higher academic institutions, cannot rely on politics or anything else. If they want to get into that orbit, there is no choice but to go on the basis of merit. Higher education (HE) policies use research as economic driver due to following; (1) Global knowledge-economy → Strategic importance of national research strategy (2) National and regional development → production of new knowledge, knowledge transfer and economic performance (3) Role and mission of HE → task of growing research capability and capacity no longer optional (4) Innovation, application and knowledge specialization → competitive advantage and performance To achieve these above policy contents the institutions count on their strength based on the following important aspects. (1) Institutional history and development (2) Research experience, capability and capacity (3) HE system and role of individual HEIs (Higher Education Institutions) in contributing to wealth creation. However the Higher Education Institutions today have no choice but to address the following challenges to compete for survival. (1) Poor institutional infrastructure for research and innovation (2) Limited scale and critical mass for economical use of resources (3) Academic staff often without necessary prerequisites (4) Not traditionally resourced for research and research culture (5) Academic workload tensions (6) New disciplines without research tradition In response to the challenges ahead the Higher Education Institutions in Malaysia are likely to have charted out their directions based on the following two scenarios: 1). A very few research universities concentrate all world class research across all disciplines; rest concentrate on undergraduate or professional teaching with limited locally relevant applied research. 2) Spread of teaching and research excellence with universities as 'main proximity knowledge providers' driven to specialize in areas of their excellence because of relevance and competences. Thus this paper attempts to answer the concerns and challenges faced by higher education institutions in Malaysia today.