Academic research output fails to meet industry needs as communication gap widens

Faced with growing demand for high impact research to drive industrial innovation and value addition processes, universities appear to be failing in their function as creators both of basic and applied knowledge.

Increasingly, governments of advanced economies are looking for a more direct and larger-scale involvement of academic research in knowledge based growth, a strong reminder of the importance of universities’ core mission as initiators of fundamental curiosity driven research for industry science links.

In November 2016, Abdullahi Bichi Baffa the executive secretary of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) said the fund has spent N1.7 billion on the National Research Fund but the researches have not translated into any improvement in the ranking of tertiary institutions in the country.

“TETFund has spent N1.7 billion on National Research Fund but what has the nation benefitted? Grants (to researchers) will henceforth be based on performance-based research,” he said. The Fund has budgeted N1 billion for the National Research Fund.

This draws attention to the quality and intensity of research from various institutions, people familiar with the matter say there are mixed results. This is because whilst some individual lecturers or institution are committed to research this has not necessarily translated into a national culture and not all the research output has been geared towards community transformation.

“There are quite a number of universities that are doing relevant research and the output is usually directly beneficial to the immediate university environment or community” Debo Adeyewa, vice chancellor of Redeemer’s University, Ede, Osun State said in telephone interview.

Adeyewa added, “there are serious research minded lecturers and sometimes students who know that this is their vocation, this is their job. The job of a university teacher or lecturer is threefold: conduct research, disseminate the product of the research through teaching and community service. Research is therefore at the heart of what a lecturer does.”

Experts say research intensive universities are normally rated higher than less research intensive ones in the world. Not every university unfortunately is research intensive. At such universities lecturers just teach and get promoted with or without research. Such universities are not respect across the world and a good number Nigerian universities belong to this category, which explains why they rank so poorly.

“Some universities are currently supporting industries with research but most of these researches are too academic and abstract in nature, and this is why there is a big gap between the industry and the research output,” Muda Yusuf, director general, Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) said in a telephone response to questions.

“There is no alignment between industries and university research output. For a university research to be of value to industries, it must meet their industrial need by looking at problems industries want to solve,” Yusuf said.

A cross section of responses harvested from chief executive officers and production managers’ surveyed by BusinessDay show that universities’ approach to research is the problem. They strongly suggested schools should ensure that the industries are consulted first before any research is carried out.

Yusuf also stated that some industries are currently contributing to endowment of chair for particular courses. “At the Chamber we support an endowment of chairs for entrepreneurship which is now an annual scholarship,” he said.

Some university dons, whilst acknowledging the need for improvement in both the quantity and quality of research contend that the situation is not as bad some make it look.

“We need a reasonable level of research infrastructure to publish peer reviewed articles in high impact journals and we need excellent teachers to enable our graduates to perform confidently in the work place” Ibidapo Obe, distinguished professor of Systems Engineering and former VC of the University of Lagos, Akoka, wrote in an emailed response.

Obe was quick to add, “sometimes, I wonder if our universities are the way they are classified at least in Africa. I have been to several universities in Africa and I can say that in spite of everything that apart from a few iconic universities in South Africa and Egypt; few of them are better than our first and second generation universities.”

While this appears like patting older generation Nigerian universities on the back, there is urgent need to rapidly upgrade these universities if they are play any significant role in the fourth industrial revolution by feeding industry with relevant research output. To achieve this, some solutions have been suggested.

“The first direction is research capacity building. There is the need to run annual, intensive, capacity-building (training) workshops on contemporary research techniques, for cohorts of science researchers. During the last five years, dotted all over Nigeria, are specks of such research capacity-building efforts which have had feeble impact in bolstering overall national contributions to the global science and technology research literature” said Peter Okebukola, former executive secretary of the National University Commission.

Victor Odumuyiwa, lecturer department of Computer Sciences, stated “there are researches going on but the biggest problem has been the chasm between academic researchers and captains of industry. This communication gap is responsible for a lot of research output gathering dust on the shelves of universities.”

Adeyewa contended the government has a great role to play in realigning academic research to industry needs.

“A proactive government should challenge its universities to come up with solutions to problems in the society. The United States of America, the United Kingdom and other advanced economies do this. They challenge their researchers and say these are the problems we have, universities come up with solutions.” Adeyewa said.

He added “sometimes it could be a local government that has the problem and throws the challenge out.  They present a prize for any solution, which resolves the problem. Is our government doing that? Is there any fund that encourages innovative research?”

 

STEPHEN ONYEKWELU