The Constant Search for New Sustainable Funding Sources for Public Universities

Although publicly-funded universities receive financial support from governments for teaching, research and infrastructure, they require additional sources of income in order to survive and thrive, and particularly to allow innovation and strategic development. It is amongst the responsibilities of the university leadership to ensure financial viability and to seek novel sources of funding, tasks for which they are not always well-trained. In this chapter, the author draws on his experience as a university leader on two continents to illustrate the possibilities as well as some of the hurdles and challenges. The chapter includes sections on philanthropy; alumni relations; industry/business relationships; commercialisation of research; and digital technologies & future horizons. Universities need to diversify their income streams, invest to succeed and get better at demonstrating their societal worth. Education is one of the most powerful tools of social and economic mobility. The world needs us to succeed!

From Local Academic Spin-Off to International Firm: The Case of VisLab

Universities play an important role in developing and transferring technology. In Italy, much innovation takes place where universities are located outside large towns, as in the case of VisLab. VisLab, the Vision and Intelligent Systems Laboratory, founded by Prof. Alberto Broggi of Parma University, is a pioneer in perception systems and autonomous vehicle research. It is also the spin-off of the University of Parma acquired by Silicon Valley company Ambarella Inc., in July 2015 for $30 million. After the deal, VisLab remained in Italy and all the staff, about thirty researchers, were hired by VisLab for the Parma location. This paper examines the university-industry interaction and, in particular, academic spin-off, as a source of economic growth, pointing out the importance of the context. The study describes the main characteristics of the VisLab case, including the possible alternative strategies, the structure of the final M&A deal and the advantages deriving from Parma and surrounding area. Despite, or perhaps because of its originality, the VisLab case seems to confirm the rule. It suggests that universities can play a key role in technology transfer: universities provide knowledge and trained personnel to firms, facilitating interaction between research and industry. Thus, policy makers should promote the commercialisation of research outcomes.

EYE ON CHINA

JHL Biotech Opens Innovative Biosimilars Manufacturing Facility in China Chinese Researchers Find Direct Evidence that Zika Causes Microcephaly in Mice President Xi Jinping Stresses Science and Technology Intertek CEO Visits China and Signs Strategic Partnership with CCIC and CQC to Promote Technical Innovation and Quality Assurance Chinese Academy of Sciences Tops Global Science Institutions Gene Decides How Young We Look China Makes Plan to Accelerate Commercialisation of Research Findings HONG KONG NEWS – Prenetics Launches iGenes Test with Quality HealthCares HONG KONG NEWS – ORI Healthcare Fund Invests in Pillar Biosciences

Laboratory Life and the Economics of Science in Law

Issuing a bold and, in light of current preoccupations with AIME, untimely call for the continued relevance of Laboratory Life, David Caudill’s chapter realigns the question of Latour’s value for legal theory. Rather than mapping the unstable, unpredictable movements of the legal trajectory – a term that, in preceding chapters, has taken on several perhaps inconsistent layers of meaning – Caudill proposes to reconsider the relationship between law and the sciences (and revisits some of the drama of the Science Wars) under the auspices of the economics of science, a flourishing sub-field of science studies veritably inaugurated by Laboratory Life’s influential discussion of cycles of credit and credibility. Deftly untangling the law-sciences-economics knot, Caudill stages the matter of Philip Mirowski v. Bruno Latour (and Michel Callon), in which the defendants were accused of complicity with neoliberalism and charged, by proxy, with the allegedly pernicious effects of the increasing commercialisation of research on the scientific establishment. Mirowski’s critique runs out of steam, Caudill shows, and runs off the rails as soon as the details of law’s appropriation of scientific research and evidence are examined. But the often dismaying implications of Science Wars-era disputes – now being recapitulated or replayed in miniature, in the economics wing of the science studies field and in legal studies – continue to haunt contemporary law as well as science policy, because it remains unclear to what extent judges and regulators (and legal academics) appreciate the material contributions of works like Laboratory Life to the improvement of our understanding of the sciences, and to what extent the co-production thesis developed by Latour, Callon and others still registers as a fanciful exercise in debunking.

COMMERCIALISATION OF RESEARCH RESULTS IN HIGHER SCHOOLS

The commercialisation of research results is very important in the world now. The situation of this problem in Europe is analysed in the paper. The possibility to use 4–6 Framework programme projects for commercialisation of research results is discussed at large. The situation of the results commercialisation using international projects in Lithuania as an example of Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (VGTU) is surveyed. The analysis of international projects results for ten last years in the VGTU using research reports and archive data of the VGTU is performed. Proposals for developing the international projects and the way to intensify the research results of commercialisation in Lithuania are presented in conclusions.