Education
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Topic: International University Collaborations as an Innovation Strategy for Catching-up Countries — An impact study of the MIT-Portugal Program
By: Sebastian Pfotenhauer ‘10
Supervisor: Dan Roos
Description of the project:
As the world turns increasingly towards knowledge economies, the intersection between innovation, higher education, and research policies continues to gain importance. In particular for ‘catching-up countries’ — i.e. those which aim at closing existing gaps in education and technology — targeted innovation strategies involving academia, industry and government become an economic imperative. These and other factors forces universities to depart from their traditional missions and adopt new models of education, research, organization and stakeholdership.
In my research, I am looking at the MIT Portugal Program as an innovation strategy case study at the intersection of national higher education and innovation systems. I am particularly interested in how integrative international university-collaborations like MIT-Portugal help to tackle specific challenges that are hard, if not impossible, from within a country or institution, including internationalization, the strengthening of university-industry linkages, changes in the overall Portuguese research and education culture, student recruitment, and the implementation of industry-related R&D and technology transfer activities in a country with traditionally low R&D rates. These changes are all the more interesting as they are externally induced and very localized, i.e. they appear in specific departments at universities that otherwise continue their traditional mode of operation. My thesis shall contribute to an understanding if integrative international university collaborations such as MIT Portugal are successful in what they are trying to achieve, and whether they could represent a generalizable innovation strategy for other catching-up countries.
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