What is wrong with Knowledge Exchange

Uncertain student recruitment and the loss of grant income after Brexit has pushed universities to (finally) some serious consideration of income generation through commercialisation. While most institutions in the UK are non-profit, they still need to balance their budgets and service a significant debt overhang created by years of over investment in shiny new things (that mostly did not translate to improved student recruitment).

KEF or the Knowledge Exchange Framework is the excuse everyone was waiting for to try and generate some side income. The blurb is that ‘knowledge exchange’ covers a wide range of activities universities undertake with partners. This is meant to be for the benefit of the economy and society, but any and every interest is based in income generation. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against income generation. What I do have a problem with is the sub-optimal use of KE to achieve such aims. I will explain what is wrong and what to do about it briefly in the rest of this article.

The position of many a university management team seems to be ‘we generate all this knowledge, surely we can sell it to someone’. Wrong. Yes, universities generate knowledge, but apart from applied sciences very little of it has direct commercial applications or is of immediate interest to business. If you are an academic in social sciences, humanities or the arts what is it you do that has commercial applications? Law schools are exceptionally bad at this. There is a simple reason. Law academics cannot (and are not qualified to) offer legal advice. People pay law firms for this, they do not ask academics. This is part of the reason why all the panels on KEF that you have sat at, and all conversations you have participated in started with ‘lets make some money’ and ended up with ‘lets apply for some grants’. Grant based research income is what universities and academics understand and gravitate towards. Selling things isn’t what they know how to do.

However, here is the great paradox. Most academics subsidise their below average incomes with external work. I will not bore you with statistics as to why I think our incomes are sub-par, look at your own finances and you can work it out. Colleagues nonetheless make a great deal of money on the side, not only through teaching and writing jobs for third parties, but also through consultancy and engagement with industry. But you would not know about it, and they won’t tell you if you ask them. Why not? Because most universities ‘encourage’ consultancy by stealing a good chunk of it to provide absolutely nothing in return other than payroll facilitation. Also, most institutions frown upon (or directly prohibit) side-gigs and harass staff who openly engage in them. It is actually comical how management behaves like an exploitative umbrella company on the one hand, and then turns around and asks: ‘does anyone have any ideas on how to make some money?’.

There is a way around this. Any university that wants to seriously promote commercialisation of its knowledge production needs to reward staff who already engage in it and stop taking a cut like a mafia boss. If universities drop their ‘exclusivity of service’ obsession, stop shaving off a proportion of consultancy income and reward staff who engage in knowledge exchange through promotion and progression, suddenly a great deal of ideas on income generation will appear as if from nowhere. Maybe the bulk of our research does not have commercial applications, but we, as people, have skills and knowledge industry is willing to pay for and does regularly ask for.

In conclusion, this is my recommendation to you, if you are involved in university management. Stop chasing after research income (see here for a reflection on that largely fruitless endeavour) and let your most successful people show you the money.

For more information on my personal knowledge exchange activity watch the video below

If you enjoyed this article, participate in the discussion in the comments and share it with a friend. Also, if you are interested in e-learning, see here  for resources for academics.