Dr. Bijesh Mishra

Academic world and universities used to be the one of the most innovative places to work. Generally speaking, pre-21st century, the most of the innovative break-through happened in the university settings. However, lately, universities are accused of being less innovative and more routined task of publishing, getting tenured, and getting grant. I found that these accusation are not just “accusation” but something real that are being felt by some academicians even though several of them believe that academia is the most innovative place (which, I don’t totally disagree!). Last week during USAEE/IAEE meeting, I get some sense of how academic community, who are awaken by the phenomenon/fact/opinion (whatever you want to call it!) that academia is becoming less innovative, are attending these types of interdisciplinary meeting rather than academic-heavy meetings.

Last week I got opportunities to talk with several young and established researchers in USAEE/IAEE meeting. This meeting is a circle of researchers, government stakeholders, industry partners, and individuals who are working in the field of, broadly speaking, energy. They are economists, engineers, advocates, policy makers, investors, developers, etc. This meeting provides opportunities to see and listen works from diverse fields. During the meeting, I managed to ask participants about their motivation and experience attending the meeting. I received diverse answers. Young researchers were motivated to participate to showcase their work to academic and industry partners and open up themselves to future opportunities. Established researchers were hoping to get “opportunities to innovate” through the conference. This caught my attention which motivated me to ask a natural questions, “how about attending academic-heavy conferences?”. In response to this question, several researcher’s answers resonate close with academic-heavy meetings have less to offer than these types of multi-sectoral meetings because academic-heavy meetings provide less ideas to innovate.

The goal behind learning new things is to innovate and bring new ideas and tools that helps to solve the problem. University is the best place to learn new ideas because there are professors and teachers who are teaching advancing new knowledge in the field. University is also a place where young and fresh minds with lots of risk absorbing capacity join to advance their education. It is most likely university is the place where these young minds get their fresh set of new ideas to solve the problem they care the most. A common-sense convention is that industry is supposed to be focused on profit-making rather than innovating. Ironically, academicians are admitting that universities are less innovative than industry¹. The positive side of this conversation about university being less innovative than industry suggests that academic community also like to innovate. However, they have to rely on industry partners to innovate, get ideas, and funding (?!).

I guess, here I am not trying to conclude or recommend anything but writing this contradicting thoughts to bring a new discussion. Some of the questions that came on my mind after hearing from meeting participants are:

• If this is a new shift that are silently but gradually happening in the academic community?
• If this shift is being observed only among established academicians or other academicians in their early to mid-career stages?
• Is university still a relevant place for new minds to join and work on innovative ideas?
• Can academicians change the way university innovate without innovation being too risky at any stage of their career?

1. You may critique that innovation in university may not be necessarily are reflected in academic-conference. That may be true, however, my argument is that academic conference is the place where academicians (professors, students, and others) present their work, and do panel discussion on topics, and share ideas. So, conferences are most public venue where innovation in universities are publicly presented. ↩︎