Revisiting The Mandates and Missions of Our Institutions
Today, I riff off some pieces relating to the changing role of universities and look at whether we should revisit the institutional architecture of innovation in Canada more broadly. Plus, there are some reading recommendations on AI, on place-based impacts of tariffs, and how to get things done.
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Revisiting The Mandates and Missions of Our Institutions
There have been a few interesting pieces recently on the changed role of universities and how mission creep has seen them struggle to achieve the tasks that society, governments, and they themselves have assigned them.
The first is a piece by Alex Usher back in December. In Usher’s view, “universities are, globally, caught in a conflict of their basic institutional logics”. He characterized this change in logic in two phases. The first that emerged in the post-war period was where universities were essentially “holding companies for the research agendas of individual professors.” For years, this model worked in churning out scientific output and teaching students. For Usher, universities at this time were rather like jazz bands, where no central coordination is necessary and where “anarchy is the point”.
However, more recent decades have seen a proliferation of other missions and imperatives for universities: “Instead of being asked to provide research, they were asked to promote local economic growth, or provide solutions to “grand challenges” or sustainable development goals.” However, the structures of the previous model have not necessarily translated well to this expansion of mandates. Usher argues that these new roles “imply a need for more durable structures to bring stability to partnerships and relationships” and that they “require institutions to be able to act corporately, strategically” - more like a symphony orchestra than a jazz band.
However, there has not been a corresponding shift in how universities are run, partly because they are still being asked to fulfil their old roles. As Usher argues, “That’s a recipe not only for unhappiness, but also for incoherence. Universities are simply becoming less effective as their missions multiply.” This has, in turn, resulted in an expectations gap that threatens higher education institutions in light of uncertain financial futures.
Ben Reinhardt, a US-based innovator and writer, has also recently tackled this topic in a much longer essay, where he argues for the need to unbundle the university. Reinhardt starts from very similar places to Usher, that 21st century universities have accumulated a massive “bundle” of societal roles and missions. However, he places a much greater emphasis on the failings of the current university model for “pre-commercial technology research”.
Reinhardt doesn’t argue for completely dismantling the current system but instead pushes a case for certain roles to be separated, particularly around that commercialization point. Here, he makes the case that academia’s “core structures and incentives revolve around education and scientific inquiry, not building useful technologies”. This misalignment includes that:
Training academics and building technology effectively are at odds
Academia incentivizes new discoveries, not useful inventions
Academic incentives make large teams hard
Universities have become a bureaucratic mess
University tech transfer offices add massive friction to spinning out technologies
In part, Reinhardt points to the decline of other intermediary organizations that can take research over the valley of death, such as government and corporate research labs (such as Bell Labs). Where these still exist, “the reality is that they’re still subject to many of the incentives that make universities a poor place for pre-commercial technology research” - including through being based at universities or having university-affiliated professors as PIs. For Reinhardt, unbundling is the answer to this, to find different homes for the commercialization roles that universities are currently fulfilling - a somewhat self-interested argument as his organization Speculative Technologies is set up to try and address some of these gaps.
Both pieces point to the need to reexamine institutions with fresh eyes. We need to do this more to determine whether mandates remain aligned with needs, whether funding (and financial incentives) match desired societal and economic outcomes, and find where there are gaps that need to be addressed.
The lack of commercialization intermediaries is definitely one such gap. While I was working at the Royal Society in the UK, there was some discussion about how years of austerity and cutbacks over decades had eroded and dismantled the government’s research labs and scientific infrastructure and how their absence contributed to the UK’s own commercialization challenges. Canada retains more than the UK, but over time, we have seen organizations repeatedly spun out of NRC, which has weakened its mandate and role in the national ecosystem and in local ecosystems. And we certainly have our own commercialization challenges that should prompt more thought on this topic.
It is worth questioning whether the institutional architecture we have is fit for the purpose of delivering the outcomes we want to see. I certainly think there is a strong case for a reassessment of the roles we want universities to play - and where the funding for those roles comes from. Unfortunately, that is sadly absent in the Ontario election right now, the province that most urgently needs to look at the financial landscape for post-secondary education (as a separate Alex Usher blog recently set out).
We could do with a more holistic approach than just looking at universities, though. As Senator Colin Deacon set out in a report in the fall, the “federal innovation universe totals over one hundred and forty programs reporting to twenty-eight departments or crown corporations”. Though he didn’t get into the provincial picture, provincial innovation programs must at least double those figures, if not triple them.
Are the institutions that house these programs fit for their roles? Do we need to look more at their governance and their funding formulas? What would some institutional innovation look like that could perhaps take some of these programs across levels of government and make them more than the sum of their parts?
We won’t get a commitment to do that in the Ontario election, but perhaps the federal election will deliver some fresh thinking on these types of questions. One can but hope.
Reading Recommendations
You’ll have no doubt seen that this week saw Paris host the AI Action Summit. Notable developments include the US and UK refusing to sign onto the joint declaration along with a big vibe shift away from AI safety and regulation. I’ve not had a chance to really dig too deep into the immense amount of stuff that has come out around the summit yet, but Taylor Owen’s write-up is worth checking out. His observations break down into three main buckets: that the new mantra in tech is “AI Adoption”, that governments are shifting from governance to Foreign Direct Investment, and that we are seeing the first example of Smash & Grab US diplomacy.
One extra piece from Paris was the official launch of the AI Adoption Initiative. The Initiative has published a whitepaper on accelerating adoption by Marc Etienne Ouimette, Ed Teather, and Kevin Allison, along with a follow-up paper based on insights from a workshop it held on the topic. If you’re thinking more broadly about AI adoption (or even tech adoption), the two contain lots of interesting material.
On tariffs, Stephen Tapp at the Business Data Lab has published an interesting analysis of which Canadian cities are most exposed to Trump’s tariffs. As I’ve argued many times, place matters, and we need to do this kind of work to understand how changes impact different places. There is no one-size-fits-all response to the tariff threat, especially in so far as they impact real people, in real jobs, in real firms, in real communities. It is great that the BDL is putting out timely analysis like this.
Finally, on a completely different note, this short piece from the excellent Statecraft newsletter is worth a read if you’re interested in how to get things done.
Three Principles for Running a White House Office
It examines some of the principles and approaches of Tom Kalil, the former Deputy Director for Policy in the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Senior Advisor for Science, Technology, and Innovation for the National Economic Council under Obama’s presidency. How to effectively move big things forward in complex and bureaucratic organizations is an art form, and there are some great insights in this.
