Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)
President (Rector) Anders Flodström Presentation
President (Rector) Anders Flodström, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
It’s great fun to be here, and great fun to be able to talk to you. It’s also fun listening to you. It gets one to thinking about the role of the rector. I can see that you are all so excited about what you’re doing, and the role of the rector is sometimes not to get too excited.
But sometimes I do get excited. We had a project of putting microchips on all the cross-country runners, the 10,000, in Dolanein, Sweden, an idea that I very much supported, and I got it to happen. One of the reasons was that my head of administration was participating, so it was a way of keeping track of the head of administration. Unfortunately, doing that I sort of touched a bit on the problem with university-industry relations, because we were not actually allowed to use the Swedish University Net to do this in a commercial way.
Lucy [Smith] started this discussion in a very nice way, I think, talking about the relations between university and industry, or universities and societies, and how those could change. In the beginning of the 60’s and 70’s, we had a different attitude, that this was not, perhaps, the best way to promote the development of universities. Listening to this type of session, you can almost believe that we have turned to a new paradigm. But I don’t think we have actually gone that far. Of course, the discussion of what is good in university and industry relations, and what’s bad from the university side, is a life-long discussion. It started in the beginning of the 14th century, I think, with the pope, who appreciated the universities in that they were a new environment for creating new knowledge, but also considered them a dangerous environment to some sense of the church.
I would like to start the discussion of industry-university relations from an engineering standpoint. I think one could say that we have two traditions, or dual traditions, for an engineering university. One tradition is very much based on education, higher education. And that tradition is not what you could call the academic tradition, but it’s more practical, more tied into actual professions. And I think that all the engineering universities around the world started that way, with very close connections, through the people you were educating, to the different industrial sectors for which you were educating them. For example, at my university, the first programs were obviously civil engineering because we were building all the rails, all the harbors, all the roads in the middle of the 19th century. Also metallurgy, which for Sweden at that time was the ICT industry. Today, of course, we need to keep that connection, those university-industry relations, and it’s equally important that we form new programs within media technology and biotechnology.
Concerning higher education and the formation of new programs, I think we can have very fruitful collaborations in Sweden. The programs we are creating together are very appropriate, both for ourselves and for Swedish industry. Of course, it’s a problem when it comes to how many students enter the different programs. But we still move along quite well. At my university, about 50% of the actual places available in engineering are within ICT, and close to 25% are in the biotechnology area. Perhaps one could argue that we are too connected to industry when it comes to higher education, but we feel fairly safe in this discussion, or at least I think so.
As for the academic part of engineering, I think one should first remember that this part is not very old. We became a real university, with graduates, or doctorates, really, only in the end of the 1920’s. I think it’s pretty much the same for engineering universities on the U.S. side. As you know, engineering was at first merely applied natural science. Engineering really has ICT to thank for its independence, nowadays, because if you hadn’t had ICT and computer science beginning in the 60’s, we would still be sort of a minor science tied into natural science. But now we have the self-esteem and the self-confidence which comes with this new revolution. We know that ICT is not built on any physics or any chemistry, it’s simply built on mathematics and our way of working with theory. So we became much more central in the development of ICT. With ICT, engineering lost the close connection to natural science because of the many ties to all the other areas of science, to sociology, to economics, and so on. So engineering has been moved to the center, which is important to remember.
It’s also important to remember that when we look at the industrial or business development during the last years, it has been especially dramatic, in Sweden at least. In the beginning of the 90’s, we lost hundreds of thousands of jobs in Sweden, and we were very low as a country. Nowadays, we have very high self-esteem, almost like in the 60’s, with journals like Newsweek talking about cool clubs, IPO’s, and the new companies, and BusinessWeek talking about Nordic Vikings. I think there has been a trend within industry to go from production to products. New products and new innovations have been the way to promote economic growth, rather than more efficient production. I often say that all industry nowadays is going to become like the French fashion industry--it’s going to be a design department and a marketing department, and the product can happen anywhere, wherever it is cheapest. Perhaps that's the wrong view, but making production more efficient, of course, brings more money into the company and means that more people are employed in production.
But the attitude has changed. And this changing attitude, with more new products, more new processes, more new innovations, puts the focus on the universities in quite a new way. This new focus has also changed the way we interact with industry. When I started to interact with industry in the 70’s, we had sector agencies which sponsored industrial-related research. These sector agencies were fairly rich, so about half the contracts signed in a year came from them. But essentially they were so poorly defined that you took the sector money, you took the industrial money, you took the faculty money, you took the research council money, you put it into one big purse and then you made up your own budget, you divided it among the different students who were conducting the research and could, in fact, demand all of it. Then you had to write different reports to the different agencies, and keep track of what you wrote in the reports. But essentially you did the same type of research for all of your customers.
Today, it’s impossible to do that. The contracts from industry and from sector agencies are very concrete, and often they also make a point in industry to keep track of you. So there's no chance of getting away with the old way of doing it. You have to collaborate in a more direct way, in a more controlled way. Sometimes you wonder if the 60’s weren't better for promoting innovation, because being so tied to a specific contract and specific boards with specific visions is counterproductive. But I think the best way is somewhere between what we did in the 70’s and what we’re doing today.
And I think that, in the future, we will continue to live in this world; the emphasis on products will stay. That trend is not only within ICT. When I talk to the pulp and paper industry in Sweden nowadays, no one talks about a more efficient process, but they ask me if I can help them to make better diapers, if I can help them to make better printing materials, if I can help them to create intelligent paper. So they are making this same move towards products. I’m very sure that when they move towards products, ICT very often plays an important part.
It is a changing world in terms of our industrial relations, and we have to deal with this. More concretely, we have the problem of how much information we should disseminate and how much should be kept in secrecy, how tied in we should be to the contracts. This discussion is now very, very important. You can see it on this campus. In ‘64, someone was standing up at Sproul and arguing that Berkeley was too bent on industry. Two years ago, in 1998, there was a discussion about the research with drug companies. We still have exactly the same problem.
I would like to finish up with the idea that perhaps in dealing with this trend, to go back to what Gary Matkin was saying, we can’t handle this in a continuous way. We have to do experiments with completely new models, completely new ways of doing things. For my part, I would like to report on a fascinating experiment we are doing in Shista, the northern suburbs of Stockholm. Shista is one of the main ICT areas in Europe. There are 27,000 people working in the ICT area there; there are 400 companies, including big and small ones. And we are now creating an IT university that’s fully integrated with these companies. The major part of the doctoral students will still be employed in the different companies. All research projects will be joint research projects between companies and the university. The information centers and libraries, are joint projects of the universities and the companies. For the first time, we’re also moving outside Sweden to attract companies and funding.
In doing this type of experiment, where you break all the rules you can break, you try all possible new ways within the ICT area, and learn by the results. To do this in a discontinuous way is the only way to handle this in the future. Handling it in a continuous way could take too long, so that we will be overrun by other different organizations who are much quicker, and doing it in continuous way could create the wrong mechanisms. We have to start at the bottom, building mechanisms for industrial and university collaboration in a completely different way.
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