History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Marja Häyrinen-Alestalo
University of Helsinki, Department of Sociology, Research Group for Comparative Sociology, marja.alestalo@helsinki.fi
NEW TECHNOLOGIES — NEW MARKETS FOR THE UNIVERSITIES?
Aside from the new growth theory of the impacts of knowledge and competences on economic growth, the theory of the new economy has echoed the tendency to see new technologies as basic elements of the modernization of the economy. Concomitantly, the production, marketing and commercialisation processes of these high techs (information and telecommunication technologies (ICT) and biotechnology) are supposed to create networks where the producers, disseminators and sellers of knowledge form strategic alliances and horizontal structures being thereby more resistant to the fluctuations of economic growth. Recent worldwide experiences of economic depression and of the difficulties of the ICT-cluster to maintain its market lead demonstrate that the validity of the theory of the new economy is worth scrutinising.
Even though the premises of the new economy can be questioned, they have had an impact on the governments willingness to support new technology products and to promote the concentration process where national growth poles and centres of competencies act as the key units. The growth pole policy can be seen as a national response to the demands of globalization. It has also been applied to reorientate the national and local economies and provision and mobility of the labor force. So the earlier diffuse push for making the universities more market oriented has been changed into an intentional growth pole policy wherein the universities have been taken as partners in the national and local concentration process (the coming of the cities among the economic actors). This policy is highly competitive and undermines the idea of state regulation and of the provision of the common good that were seen as important goals during the reformist period of the welfare state. New high tech-based knowledge centres are important to promote the private good; only as a secondary outcome the economic good will provide elements for the provision of the common good. In this situation it is relevant to ask: How much public money should be spent to make academic products attractive for the private use? Whose benefits will be served? Who will take the risk?
Today it seems to be more important to the technology and university policy makers to integrate universities into the economic concentration process than to discuss the actual commercial value of academic products in international high tech markets. The experiences of university related technopoles, biocentres and biomedicums in Finland demonstrate, that capital accumulation and surplus value are problematic issues if strict principles of business and market laws are applied. If these institutions become more commercially than academically oriented, they find it difficult to integrate the commercial functions with the basic academic functions (basic research and education).
The market expectations of the new economy are based on the examples from the ICT-cluster but they have also been regarded as suitable to biotechnology. The market demand in the case of the ICT is, however, much more visible, depite the growing debate of the possible commercial dawn of this cluster. The future commercial promises of biotechnology are still waiting for their fulfilment. The commercialisation processes of biotechnologies are, however, long and complicated, and it is difficult to estimate the investment value and the amount of returns to industry. As the zero risk is not achievable in many cases, safety and public concern become factors of market demand. Technopoles and biocentres are therefore commercially in a different position. These kinds of variations in market functioning should be taken account when discussing the extension of academic activities towards the provision of new high tech products. At the same time it is necessary to broaden the networks of relevant partners to comprise the elements of public concern and citizen participation.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006