Heritage

Why businesses should partner with varsities

grads

A graduation ceremony. Kenyan corporations keep themselves too distant from academics then complain when the same academia fails to meet their needs. FILE PHOTO | NMG

Many players in the post-secondary education space in Kenya ponder the perennial issue plaguing Kenya’s business research output at our universities. How do we enhance our depth and breadth of business knowledge generated for our local contextual needs?

The academic world and the business world hold a symbiotic relationship.

Academia should boost industry and industry should in turn boost academia. However, much press time gets devoted to whether universities prepare graduates adequately for the job market. Many pundits point to colleges, institutes and universities as failing to adequately teach their students.

However, here in Kenya, corporations keep themselves too distant from academics then complain when the same academia fails to meet their needs.

A wonderful tradition stands in Kenya that corporate CEOs speak generously at numerous events at universities across the nation. Unfortunately, this is not nearly enough engagement.

Companies should sponsor laboratories, classrooms and centres. Corporations should fund cutting-edge research from leading Kenyan academics into their industries.

In South Africa, the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, South Korea and many other countries, the business community integrates far more with academia. When corporations partner more with universities and fund research, then their industry needs become more in sync with the university system’s output and graduates’ knowledge.

Also, Kenya retains bureaucratic hoops to jump through for researchers requiring government permits to research anything and everything when usually in most other nations a university’s own internal research ethics review process proves sufficient. The National Council for Science and Technology (NACOSTI) defines research as “any investigation or inquiry or interview that aims to collect data or information, academic or non-academic, that will lead to new information and/or knowledge.”

So, technically even companies who want to know their customer’s opinions should go through the headache of getting a permit before each client listening process. If research powerhouses such as Canada, with a smaller population than Kenya, required such bureaucracy to create knowledge, then much knowledge would not get generated.

Regulation does not foster innovation or creativity but rather stifles it. Knowing this, the NACOSTI does try to implement the Science, Technology and Innovation Act, 2013 (Revised 2014) in more efficient ways by developing online processing, workshops, and getting partner institutions to also review research permit requests. In so doing, the agency is making the process better and less cumbersome.

However, the entity still charges foreigners desirous of conducting research in Kenya with exorbitant permit prices. So, when large-scale multi-country culture, management, leadership, and organisational behaviour research gets conducted by the world’s leading universities and researchers, Kenya often fails to feature while instead other sub-Saharan African nations jump at the research opportunities and collaborate eagerly.

In short, how do we improve our business research quantity and quality? Dramatically increase corporate participation in universities and decrease bureaucratic hurdles. Then, the whole country benefits and we become a net exporter of knowledge. Stay tuned next week as Business Talk explores deeper ways to increase Kenya’s business research output.