Globalization and Higher Education: Major Trends and Challenges

Abstract

The rise of the knowledge economy has generated new global infrastructures, with information technology playing an increasingly important role in the global economy. Such a development has huge implications for different stakeholders in a national innovation system. For the government, how to make the country thrive in a competitive knowledge economy has become an important national development agenda. That it is often hard-pressed to orchestrate strategic research and development (R&D) activities with higher education has increasingly been seen as one key component of the national innovation system (Edquist and Hommen 2008; Etzkowitz 2008; Lundvall et al. 2006; Nelson 1993). For entrepreneurs, an era of “open innovation” is argued to have emerged, where firms, rather than conducting in-house R&D, have been increasingly outsourcing their research activities to diverse external units, including universities, so that innovation can be achieved in a more efficient manner (Chesbrough 2003; Perkmann and Walsh 2007).