History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
Silvina Santana & H.M.M. Diz
Universidade de Aveiro
Aveiro
Portugal
e-mail: silvina@ua.pt
Knowledge (De)Commodification: Funding it on Organizational Learning
A new paradigm has emerged to characterize nations capable of maintaining a sustained development and prosperity. Facilitating and supporting innovation and flexibility are organizations' knowledge bases and their learning capacities.
Universities play a decisive role in this domain, educating people, developing theories, acting as partners in technological R&D, functioning as knowledge repositories and promoting knowledge sharing. But there are also strong economic reasons for science-industry links. Supporting the business enterprise sector seems to be the only way to patch cutbacks in governmental funding and to continually track the processes of knowledge creation in the context of application.
The University has to learn to adapt to these demands. This implies changes of mission and culture, strategy, structure, curricula offered and media used, resource allocation, and external relationships. The goal is to develop an organization which generates new and edge knowledge and quickly decides when and how to make it commercially available or prevent it from commodification.
This paper defends that collaboration is the necessary key to master the unknown, and presents a model to guide university-business interaction. Stemming from organizational learning theory, the model explicitly deals with factors that can foster or hinder learning and can be used at the individual, group, organizational, interorganizational and societal level. It allows the university to analyze business sectors needs, find answers to the identified problems and evaluate to what extent it will have to redefine itself to be able to find innovative solutions and contribute to the sustained development of companies.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006