Innovation in Australian University - with the bearded men?
If you're new here at 2thinknow, and you're interested in the latest ideas on trends, companies and innovation, subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for your visit!
OPINION, Sydney — Let’s face it, innovation is not something many inside some Australian universities get.
Who gets innovation?
Some Businesses do. Innovation in business is getting it done. Innovation delivers growth, market share or world-class profits for enterprises, not necessarily at the same time.
Government can get innovation. Kennett (Victoria/Melbourne), Giuliani (New York), they got innovation. Some cities are innovation hubs. French cities also come to mind. invariably heavily centralised countries don’t lead to innovation hubs.
It’s the cities that emerge or areas like Vienna, Silicon Valley/The Bay Area, Paris, Boston, New York.
What is it about (Australian) men with beards?
I once sat in a room full of professors, chairing a group, whilst they complained their students tuned out.
I remember this event I chaired, with a room full of professors arguing, and doctrine being the key point.
Not one would listen nor respect a polite 3o something with a commercial track record of working for banks and major government (me). Someone who had applied the topic for nine years at that time. Someone whose opinion in IT was respected by top business leaders and had worked for 350 organizations.
Many of them had never left academia.
The bearded ones argued, fought, and drowned out dissent. There was no room for opinions and every (meaningless) point of academic doctrine fought.
Some stormed out (take the bat & ball and go home) incensed that someone would ask for multiple opinions, especially someone without a beard and from industry.
I wonder how the student felt engaging with these lecturers?
I wonder how the students felt raising their hand and dissenting? Or discussing?
Can knowledge grow in a fast moving field such as IT or business, when there is ONE correct viewpoint based solely on professorial fiat, not knowledge and rigour?
If you want to understand students, teach them something useful. Try to get in their world. Know the commercial world. Try to get through to them. And know some students are just there for the paper, and don’t care.
Where’s the innovation here?
But shouldn’t we want world class? Shouldn’t we want best in World?
Why doesn’t Australia have Harvard? Why not INSEAD? Why not LSE?
Don’t bleat about funding or blame students (they pay enough).
I have also talked in the past to international students profoundly disappointed in Australia’s university offerings in some topics, especially in second-tier universities.
Who is the innovator in Australia?
The standout performer is Melbourne University. I especially like their transition to the American model of generalist leading to specialisation. It took guts. It will work.
I applaud them for taking the chance.
Melbourne University has the guts to innovate.
I’d gladly sit in a class of Professor Geoffrey Blainey for instance, a world-class historian and author. His books are fascinating and world-class.
Where’s the Innovation in University?
The curriculum’s at most other Australian universities are out of date with the practice in fast-moving professions, and it has been discussed that universities are in danger of becoming job factories of declining relevance.
For example, in many cases, IT is largely off-topic and not related to commercial demand. HR is the same.
Marketing graduates from some universities in first to third year out of uni, have repeatedly told me their Bachelor-degree hasn’t taught them actual workplace skills, nor how to think.
But not only job skills, nor does in many cases it teach the love of learning.
Melbourne University model is the right one for making the leap to world-class.
I am all for a Liberal pluralistic education, and a diversity of viewpoints.
We should all be against mono-thematic one-right-answer teaching, except in hard disciplines where that is true.
Anti-innovation: Australian Men with Beards
If the beards don’t get they are becoming irrelevant, they need to realise why class sizes are shrinking is because you can’t command people to listen to your pet theories by professorial fiat.
I want Australia to have a world-class facility of innovation. We should all want the same. And some of the blokes with beards have to let go a little.
The world is not waiting for your beards to grow, gentlemen. Innovation waits for no beard.
Take care and have a trim,
Christopher
PS. This is meant to be thought-provoking. This is a conversation. Innovation without passion is dull. It goes without saying, but I shall say it anyway I am a pluralist.
innovation in patents - a patent is worth it right?
Geeks and Patents - really worth it, the Noahs Ark model.
Speaker. Author. Editor-In-Chief. Executive Director of Innovation, 2thinknow.
3 Responses to “Innovation in Australian University - with the bearded men?”
What's your View?
Or Follow us on Twitter or StumbleUpon
Christopher, exactly when did you supposedly chair a meeting or professors? From which university? If you had worked in the university sector you would know that very, very, very few professors have beards, and certainly know that the female professors are sans beards. I suspect that you thought beards equates to ‘old fashioned, 1970s beliefs’. It is also surprising that a group of professors would be interested in what you have to offer, given the disparity between you, an MBA dropout, and a group of professors.
I don’t know quite where an anonymous person gets the right to ask so many questions? As I don’t know your interest in querying an article that was written to *provoke* debate. Innovation does not happen where we all agree.
a) My brother-in-law teaches Economics as a Senior Lecturer in a London University,
b) I have friends who are university professors
c) I did indeed chair a group at the ACS IT Symposium at Deakin in Geelong in April (from memory) 2007
d) The group were university professors and lecturers for IT, which may have explained the beards on 2 of them, it was a metaphor
e) I had a 78.5 average, I halted my MBA because I felt the academic standards of the course were too low (as is written in my correspondence to the university). And if we were to have a debate about standards we should start with how many errors were in AGSM materials.
f) I have a high opinion of ANU, Melbourne Uni, Macquarie and Uni of Sydney in general, and their professors.
And now to the point, commercial real-life practical experience (FOR WHICH I HAVE NUMEROUS WRITTEN REFERENCES) from all over Government and corporate Australia (you obviously know my bio and who I have worked for) is far more valuable than theory.
Theory is useful, but the point of those discussion came to closer ties between commerce and theory. Quite frankly, what gives someone who has passed a course more knowledge than someone who has done the tasks in real life?
I also believe Melbourne University model is the way forward for Australia. As I later wrote.
Hope that sets the record straight. I’d be interested to know who you really are, as you chose anonymity. This condescending tone is obviously designed to stir me into this response, so here it is.
Christopher Hire
Thanks for your response, Christopher. The Australian university sector is a large and complex one, and I am not sure that your expressed opinions are that accurate, nor fair. ‘The bearded professors’ analogy could come straight from an Andrew Bolt column. The Melbourne Model is a hybrid of the European ‘Bologna Protocol’ model and the US graduate school system and is still very much a work in progress. Given that your views on innovation suggest that innovation have positive social outcomes, are students better off? Is society better off? That remains to be seen. The university is better off insofar as it can charge higher (graduate) fees to fewer students, and the market is better off in that there is greater differentiation, but I am not sure if these outcomes point to innovation.