Winds of change needed to blow into universities - Joe Little

Last year, I was asked, along with my fellow Entrepreneur in Residence Ross Tuffee, to write a paper on how Entrepreneurial Campuses can help transform Scotland’s technology ecosystem. This was one of the recommendations from Mark Logan’s Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review in 2020.

Rather than interviewing our institutions close to home to find best practice, we felt a more effective change would come through learning from world class entrepreneurial campuses such as Stanford and MIT in the States, Aalto in Finland, Imperial in London, and DTU in Denmark. We would then look at how institutions in Scotland could replicate to help transform Scotland’s regional economies.

Institutions like Stanford and MIT have recognisably transformed the regions where they are located. No longer do students aim to just do an undergraduate degree, then move elsewhere to develop their career and hatch business ideas…they stay.

They stay because the resources they need in terms of academic support, venture funding, mentoring, and technology are all to hand because over the course of several decades a virtuous cycle of engagement, enrichment, and a ‘giving back’ approach has made it happen.

​Joe Little is an Honorary Professor and Digital Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Stirling, an advisor to Deloitte’s Chief Futurist, and previously spent 35 years with BAE and BP in senior technology roles.

Best-of-class universities encourage faculties and students to collaborate for solutions, and enable faculties to take sabbaticals to develop their business startups, importantly with the proviso that they return to teach.

They open up their research, making it easier for industry to discover them. In turn, this encourages industry to show up with their problems and help co-create solutions.

By way of a stark comparison, by the end the conversations we had with some of these revered places of entrepreneurial learning, we had developed both a both plan and potential solution….compared to the experience here where sadly I might get a call back 9 months later to find out if we still had any interest.

In fact, what we found was that very few universities in Scotland made it easy for industry to engage and, where there was a possibility to do business, excessive licensing and lack of resources at the university to sort out legalities became the ultimate barrier.

What’s needed for real growth and transformative change is for all universities and colleges to embrace a direction of change that inspires the development of a more entrepreneurial mindset in their students, staff, and academics by promoting and teaching entrepreneurship.

They need to provide environments for students to engage in creating startups, and encourage cross-faculty participation in solving global challenges.

They need to make it simple to start a business, spin out an opportunity, and not demand an excessive cut of the result by way of equity.

But most of all, they need to make it far easier for industry to do business by making our research more discoverable and making our facilities more accessible. In return, industry needs to reengage, and share their problems and ideas more with academia.

Finally, we also need alumni relations to transform from the scary cap in hand requests for funds to a genuine connection and request for support. Our colleges and universities need these alumni back. We need alumni to help mentor students and faculties through this new direction of travel, to help them see the value in their research and to help create successful startups.

​Joe Little is an Honorary Professor and Digital Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Stirling, an advisor to Deloitte’s Chief Futurist, and previously spent 35 years with BAE and BP in senior technology roles.