Creative Doctorates, Creative Education? Aligning Universities with the Creative Economy

Abstract

During the 1980s and 1990s, the university was posed as an underutilized weapon in the battle for industrial competi-tive and regional economic growth … At university after university, new research centers were designed to attract cor-porate funding, and technology transfer offices were started to commercialize academic breakthroughs. But we may well have gone too far. Academics and university officials are becoming increasingly concerned that greater involve-ment in university research is causing a shift from fundamental science to more applied work … Universities have been naively viewed as engines of innovation that pump out new ideas that can be easily translated into commercial innova-tions and regional growth. This has led to overly mechanistic national and regional policies that seek to commercialize those ideas and transfer them to the private sector. [1]