European universities have increased their emphasis on commercializing original research so as to compete globally, to keep-up with changing demands of the knowledge economy, to offset decreased public funding, and to cope with the massification of education. “Commercializing” in this sense implies applying for patents. This chapter highlights the application of patent laws in the UK and Europe to educational technology. One of the most promising conditions under which patent law can be applied in educational technology is the peer-to-patent, originally introduced in the U.S. Another is expert-peer online assessment for resolving online disputes. The post-and-vote formula should be considered if this initiative is restarted in the future.
TopToday academic staff in universities in Europe are dissatisfied, disillusioned, even voicing their despair (Gill, 2009; Ginsberg, 2011; Burrows, 2012; Haack, 2013). Ben Martin (2016) has proposed five reasons for this state of affairs. First is the emphasis on economic efficiency, measured in economic terms.
A second reason is the creeping accountability and performance targets, which encourage changes in everyone’s behaviour toward maximising one’s score according to the designated metric (see Burrows, 2012). A third, wider reason for the dissatisfaction, disillusionment, and despair among academic staff in universities concerns globalisation and increasing competition among academic staff and students. Over the last 20 or 30 years of globalization and growing competitive pressures, there has been increasing emphasis on the ability of organizations to generate and successfully implement innovation, both technological and organizational (Martin, 2016).
A fourth reason is the growing use of head hunters to fill senior university posts. Fifth is the dramatic rise in the number of central university administrators and support staff. In the view of some, institutions of higher education are now mainly controlled by administrators and staffers who make the rules and set more and more of the priorities of academic life (Ginsberg, 2011). Academic staff are baffled and frustrated, feel powerless to resist, not least because teaching, research and their administrative responsibilities leave them chronically overstretched and unable to mount a coherent opposition.
Boiled Frog
This begs the question, why have most academics so meekly accepted these developments? Are some too timid to voice their concerns publicly, particularly if they are on performance-related pay? An analogy can be drawn with the boiled frog (Tichy & Ulrich, 1984, p.60). Experiments by physiologists in the 1870s showed that a frog dropped into a saucepan of very hot water immediately jumps out, but a frog placed in a saucepan of cold water which is then gradually brought to the boil, will not jump out but remain until it is eventually boiled (Sedgwick, 1882).
The university has an incentive to create start-ups if it is the owner of the rights, but the problem then arises of how to encourage the research scientists. It does not appear that allocating the intellectual property rights to the university is sufficient to increase the rate of start-ups, and need to incentivise researchers to do so. (Saiz-Santos, Araujo-De la Mata & Hoyos-Iruarrizaga, 2017) Burton Clark (2004) predicted that a large number of globally-dispersed universities, perhaps a majority, will not venture very far down the road of self-induced major change, and that the University of Warwick remains the entrepreneurial prototype in part because of its aggressive idealization of its “Warwick Way” (Clark, 2004). The transformation of a traditional university into an entrepreneurial university is playing an important role in the global knowledge-based economy (Sidrata & Frikhab, 2018) though performing entrepreneurial activities per se, does not automatically transform a university into an entrepreneurial university, but only when the entrepreneurial activities create added value for education and research.