The Concept of Research University: The Implementation in the Context of Malaysian University System

Abstract

‘Innovate or perish’. Universities in this age have evolved far beyond the traditional settings where university was an institution for disseminating knowledge, but today university has been running the role of country’s innovation excellence where it has become a place for disseminating and producing knowledge as well as commercializing their research output which contributed largely to the country’s economic development. Thus this paper highlight the development of research university system in Malaysia which is still at infancy stage compared to RU in the United States and United Kingdom and analyse it’s policy and management procedure so that it can become a direction to other countries which are trying to develop their research and innovation strategies

Evaluating National Innovation System of Malaysia Based on University-industry Research Collaboration: A System Thinking Approach

“…According to the Ahmed (2012), the contribution of, FDI in the Malaysian economy is as high as the contribution of physical capital and labour that negatively affect the human capital, and absorptive capacity to achieve productivity driven economy. With the major constraints of NIS it has also been observed that the development of research university system in Malaysia is still at infancy stage compared to RU in the United States and United Kingdom (Ramli et al, 2013). R&D resources provided by MOSTI's to GRIs and universities always have low industrial-oriented values research that decrease the interest of private sector in country's R&D and the number of commercialization (Asgari, 2007 Iqbal et al, (2011), provided constraints of UIRC in Malaysia, who explicitly argued that lack of education and training, conflict of intellectual property rights, time constraints, lack of technological competency, culture difference, fund and financial matter and lack of consultancy are the critical constraints of UIRC.…”

“…For instance, (Ramli, 2013) highlighted that Malaysian research universities are still in infancy stage. Author argued that research and development (R&D) activities should be developed properly in order to ensure impressive outcome and not just some non-useful invention.…”

Stimulating Technology-Based Start-Ups: Entrepreneurship Initiatives by University

“…From an academic entrepreneurship viewpoint, the primary role of technology inventor as a research faculty member will not be in conflict with subsequent business-related tasks (Jain et al, 2009) for growth and sustainability as the start-up will be managed by a trained graduate entrepreneur. In this sense, the role of researcher as an academic entrepreneur is heavily placed on the discovery and identification of technological opportunity, exploitation of commercial opportunity and development of technological product (Rahim et al, 2015). Furthermore, the common perception that scientists are technical-oriented (Wright et al, 2007, Franklin et al, 2001, Venkataraman et al, 1990) and unfit to run business due to skills (Franklin et al, 2001) and social capital (Wright et al, 2007) inadequacy can be resolved through this symbiosis program.…”

“…In the early 90s, universities have started to intensify research and development (R&D) activities given the emphasis by the Government for universities to produce technological knowledge (Ramli et al, 2013). Upon the implementation of the National Higher Education Plan (2007)(2008)(2009)(2010), a transformation was initiated, the universities were then viewed as engines of economic growth via commercialization of intellectual property (IP) as well as through technology transfer into the industrial sector.…”

Transformation of university colleges to full-pledged universities: A proposed conceptual framework for Malaysian higher learning institutions

“…Having said that, much of the researches on the transformation of HEIs in Malaysian context have been exploring the challenges in the case of APEX university (Sirat and Ahmad, 2010;Nasruddin et al, 2012), research, comprehensive and focused universities (Ramli et al, 2013;Sirat, 2013;Ahmad et al, 2014;Janudin et al, 2015), polytechnics to college universities (Hamed et al, 2010;Wahab and Zakaria, 2011) and community colleges (Leong, 2011;Don et al, 2014).…”