Becoming world-class universities Singapore style: Are organized research units the answer?

摘要

Many of the state-funded higher education institutions (HEIs) that were set up in the 70s worldwide aimed to democratize access and meet manpower demands, and also pursue research scholarship in diverse disciplines. Today, they have to also offer postgraduate programs to strengthen expertise in research, development, and consultancy in order to 'compete' in the research-vectored activities exemplified by some of the best established international players from West. A strengthened research capacity and capability seem to be normed by an evolving, shared standard of what a world-class research university (WCU) is. In particular, this pertains to managing the whole gamut of the research enterprise to enable technology transfer activities – a policy advocated in 1996 by the OECD, then in 1998 by the World Bank. The centrality of establishing development peripheries generally called organized research units, or ORU among top public universities worldwide, in conjunction with interstitial knowledge network departments such as the technology-licensing (or transfer) office, research parks, incubator centers and venture-funding agencies are becoming key features of today's WCUs.;This study sought to understand using qualitative methods why and how the Government of Singapore came to set-up ORUs in her two state-funded universities – the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU). That is, are ORUs the chief means in transforming NUS and NTU into top WCUs? The underpinnings of the institutional theory in the globalized context, the theory of academic capitalism, and guidance by frameworks on educational policy transfer, as well as the glonacal heuristics, together with content and discourse analysis of published and web-based documents, aided in the design of this study.;This study finds that key state and institutional actors in Singapore decided to emulate the key features of U.S.-originated ORUs at NTU (as well as the National University of Singapore) to make R&D innovation-led economic growth the vehicle of sustaining this global city-state's global competitiveness in the knowledge-economy and to better elevate the status of both NUS and NTU as world-class. Because global rankings have branding implications, catch-up nations and institutions should make serious attempts to balance the ranking-enhancement effort with their local, national, and regional science-research needs given the constraints of available capital and resources.