Spotlight

Universities worldwide are at a crossroads as they face growing pressure to demonstrate the real-world impact of their research. The huge growth in tertiary systems and tertiary funding, and the challenges of hiring staff to teach the students who poured into universities from the 1950s onwards, underpinned a culture of university-based research focused on what university staff were interested in, not necessarily what the rest of society was interested in. Contemporary changes in demographics in developed countries, and in the willingness of governments to fund university degrees, mean that culture has to change.

Working alongside the people, businesses and communities we serve, we need to be delivering work that transforms, is multidimensional and encompasses economic, societal and environmental benefits. Transformation goes beyond consultancy or commercialising our research. It requires us to deliver tangible improvements in outcomes for communities, businesses and ecosystems from the work we are doing.

To do this universities must redefine their metrics of success outside the traditional systems that favour academic advancement; publications in academic journals and language that is only accessible or meaningful to a small group of academics working in the same area. Instead, the real measure of success must be the tangible differences our research is making in communities and how it is addressing urgent societal, environmental and economic needs.

At the University of Waikato, we are proactively addressing this challenge by supporting transformation in areas as diverse as understanding healthcare demographics to support our most underserved and vulnerable populations, addressing affordable housing in a country with the fastest growing house prices in the OECD, and through agricultural innovations that are contributing to environmental sustainability for New Zealand, where the primary industry is our largest export earner.

For example, diabetes costs the New Zealand health system $2.1 billion every year and this is expected to rise to $3.5 billion in 2040 with Māori (the Indigenous people of New Zealand) and Pacific communities well overrepresented in statistics. By working directly with Māori primary health providers to understand prediabetes and related conditions such as obesity and heart disease, we are developing ways to effectively engage, communicate and reduce the harm before the costs mount.

In New Zealand we face a housing crisis where house prices have been rising faster than any other country in the OECD. Focussing on this problem, our engineers are transforming the landscape of affordable housing by partnering with the construction industry to develop cold formed steel solutions that make construction faster and cheaper. We have attracted financial support from industry for our work creating steel that is suitable for temporary structures, modular buildings, or retrofits due to its easy assembly and high strength-to-weight ratio. It is also recyclable and an example of research creating transformational change not only for society but also the environment.

Agriculture is New Zealand’s largest export earner and our research into uses for seaweed in agriculture is extensive. Our partnerships with industry have seen us launch New Zealand’s first commercial seaweed farm and we are now researching its potential to reduce pesticide use in agriculture, creating healthier crops, and contributing to environmental sustainability, transforming New Zealand’s agricultural future in both value and growth.

Bridging the gap between our university research and the practical demands of day-to-day business and policy development, is, however, no small task. It requires that we navigate complex relationships across government, business and our own academic communities, build interdisciplinary and community-driven programmes that start with the search for solutions to practical and significant problems and are shaped by engagement with those communities rather than the traditional disciplinary boundaries of late 20th century universities. Similarly, businesses often operate on deadlines for actionable solutions that are inconsistent with the “slow burn” of academic research, while translating research into viable products or policies requires an entrepreneurial mindset, strong partnerships, and capital.

To navigate these challenges, a key step we have taken is to soften the boundaries of the modern university by embedding our researchers within the organisations that are our partners in research development and by bringing practitioners, and partner organisations, inside the university. There has been some history of adopting this strategy in applied research areas such as engineering and computer science, and in health and medicine where the tradition of researcher-clinicians is well established. But what is required for the future is to make these approaches to partnership, and this removing of boundaries between the academy and the rest of the world, central to everything that the university does.

At the core of this transformational work is relationships. Our research is being developed alongside our stakeholders to ensure its relevance, and we are also adopting more agile research models allowing for phased outputs and incremental actionable insights. We are opening our doors to the communities and people our research serves and welcoming them to partner with us.

While much work remains to be done, to remain relevant, universities must take the step to embed themselves in the industries and communities they serve and engage deeply with them to understand their needs. By doing so, they can ensure their research not only delivers tangible impact but creates the transformation necessary to justify ongoing public funding, and necessary to bring in the private funding for research that the university of the future will need to have in large quantities if they are to have any chance of continuing to fund research excellence.