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Source: introduction to the author of Education Research of Tsinghua University, Vol. 1, 2020: Wang Jianhua, born in Xi county, Henan Province, Professor of School of Education Science, Nanjing Normal University, Professor of Lide Shuren Collaborative Innovation Center, research direction is the basic theory of higher education. DOI:10.14138/j.1001-4519.2020.01.001206.
For a long time, "innovation governance" has been equated with "national innovation governance" or "enterprise innovation governance". Universities take advanced knowledge as their legitimacy basis, and are dominated by traditional academic governance paradigms, ignoring the importance of innovation system construction and innovation governance. Under the framework of academic autonomy and academic freedom, university innovation is almost in an unorganized state. With the promotion of University's position in the national innovation system, and the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship in economic and social development. Universities need to renew their cognition of innovation and entrepreneurship, put the construction of innovation system at the center of university work, be ready for innovation and govern for innovation. It is not enough for universities to discover new science and technology or create new social technology. They must also put them into use. Discovery and invention are just the beginning of this process. The next step is innovation, which is a political issue and will inevitably need governance.
One
Innovation needs governance to have different cognition for innovation in different disciplines and fields. In higher education, the understanding of innovation mainly focuses on teaching and research. Teaching is mainly reflected in the cultivation of innovative talents, and scientific research is mainly reflected in scientific and technological innovation. However, no matter talent training or scientific research, innovation in higher education is mainly reflected in the level of "knowledge" or "knowledge". Compared with the field of higher education, the economic field has a more comprehensive and profound understanding of innovation, and has developed innovative economics. Schumpeter first expounded the connotation of innovation from the perspective of economics. In his book "theory of economic development", he pointed out that "development as we speak can be defined as the implementation of a new combination, which includes the following five situations: (1) the adoption of a new product. (2) Adopt a new production method. (3) Open up a new market. (4) A new source of supply for the acquisition or control of raw materials or semi-finished products. (5) A new organization for any industry. " After Schumpeter clarified the relationship between innovation and economic development, Drucker enriched the connotation of innovation, put forward the concepts of scientific and technological innovation, social innovation, management innovation, system innovation, market innovation and systematic innovation, which made innovation develop from an important category of economics and management into a relatively independent knowledge. As he said: in the past half century, "purposeful innovation in technology or in society has become an organized discipline, a discipline that can be taught and learned, which may be the biggest change." In addition to Schumpeter and Drucker, another scholar who makes the concept of innovation well known and has a great impact on economic and social development is Michael Porter. In his book "national competitive advantage", he divides national economic development into four stages: factor oriented stage, investment oriented stage, innovation oriented stage and wealth oriented stage. According to Porter's theory of national competitive advantage, the first three stages are the main forces of the development of national competitive advantage, which usually bring economic prosperity. The fourth stage is the turning point of economy, which may lead to the decline of national economy. At present, with the transformation of industrial society to post industrial society in the world, innovation has become a strategic resource for national development. The 2005 and 2010 U.S. competitiveness reports released by the National Academy of Sciences highlight the country's dependence on innovation. According to the 2010 report, only 4% of the country's workforce is made up of scientists and engineers, but these people provide jobs for the remaining 96% of the population disproportionately.
In the new era of innovation driven development, in order to better deal with the complexity of innovation, avoid the failure of innovation policy and innovation system, and improve the efficiency of innovation, we must establish innovation governance system.
At present, at the national level, in order to build an innovative country and realize the national innovation driven development strategy, it is necessary to introduce the public governance theory into the innovation field, "emphasizing the participation, cooperation and democracy of multi-party subjects in the formulation of innovation policy." At the university level, in order to establish an innovative and entrepreneurial university and make it the engine of innovation, it is also necessary to establish a university innovation governance system to govern for innovation. Different from national innovation governance, the reason why universities need to govern for innovation is related to the change of innovation paradigm, but it is mainly influenced by the change of University paradigm. Traditionally, university innovation is mainly confined to epistemology, driven by individual "leisure curiosity". The realization of innovation depends on the accumulation of individual talent and knowledge. Under the protection of academic autonomy and academic freedom related systems, universities, as places of inquiry, integrate themselves. Whether innovation is a natural or random process is less interfered by other non academic factors. "Our academic culture often emphasizes curiosity driven research rather than reality and grounded research. Because of an incentive system that requires original invention, university research tends to be extremely specialized and has little practical impact on incremental research. " However, today's innovation is not limited to scientific and technological innovation for the purpose of pursuing truth. Innovation has become a cross organizational, cross disciplinary, cross industry, cross regional, multi-agent, networked and global activity. Those organized and systematic innovations are no longer dominated by human curiosity, but are deeply rooted in the real needs of economic and social development. In other words, for economic and social development, "scientific and technological innovation can not be simply understood as publishing papers and patents, but only as the work of universities and scientific research institutes, which is the task of scientists. The contents of innovation are all inclusive, and the scope of innovation covers all walks of life. Innovation driven needs the participation and coordinated development of the government, enterprises, universities, scientific research institutes, social intermediaries, financial institutions and the public. Innovation driven development is not a single battle of science and technology experts. The common participation of innovation subjects has become the main trend of innovation governance in the world. Future innovation is not only scientific discovery and technological invention, but also product innovation, business innovation, model innovation, organization innovation, etc. " Based on this, the University and the whole society should go out of the misunderstanding of "innovation" - innovation is only related to the market, innovation comes from personal wisdom and innovation is largely accidental, from "unorganized innovation" to "organized innovation". In order to adapt to the complexity, uncertainty, systematization and high risk of innovation, and avoid the negative impact of bureaucracy management on innovation, it is necessary to introduce the theory and technology of public governance, and strengthen the construction of innovation governance system and innovation governance capacity.
In addition to the change of innovation paradigm, another reason why universities need to govern for innovation is the change of university development paradigm. Under the traditional paradigm, teaching and research are the two centers of the University. The relationship between universities and economic and social development is relatively distant. However, with the transformation from industrial society to post industrial society, the position of universities in the economic and social development has changed significantly. Daniel Bell pointed out in the book the coming of post industrial society: "just as commercial companies have become the core institutions of the society in the past 100 years due to the function of organizing mass production, universities (or other forms of knowledge institutions) as a new source of invention and knowledge will become the core institutions in the next 100 years." In the future knowledge society, in order to meet the needs of innovation driven development and entrepreneurship revolution, teaching and research universities need to transform to innovation and entrepreneurship universities. With the diffusion of innovation and entrepreneurship paradigm, the position of innovation and entrepreneurship in universities will be significantly improved, and will eventually become the center of university work. In this context, just like in order to adapt to the change of innovation paradigm, science and technology management will be transformed into innovation governance; in order to adapt to the transformation of university development paradigm, traditional academic governance will also be transformed into innovation governance. In the old paradigm, no matter teaching university or research university, its legitimacy is based on advanced knowledge. Therefore, academic governance is the main body of university governance. The purpose of academic governance is for academic itself, while innovation governance is for systematic innovation. For the sake of academic governance, the main consideration is academic development, while for the sake of innovation governance, we should focus on the university becoming the engine of innovation and the incubator of entrepreneurship.
In a word, the interaction between scientific and technological innovation and economic and social development in our era has significantly increased. "The relationship between science and society starts from the traditional" science and society "," science in society "to the paradigm goal of" science with society and for society ". The governance of new scientific and technological innovation has also begun to shift from internal autonomy of the scientific community to governance at a broader social level. " The practice of the development of knowledge and innovation economy also shows that in the knowledge-based post industrial society, the University as a tool of knowledge organization will be significantly strengthened, and governance for innovation will become an inevitable choice. As Drucker said, in the 20th century, the productivity of manual workers through the management of manufacturing industry has increased 50 times; in the 21st century, the most important contribution that management needs to make is similar to that in the 20th century, which is to improve the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge workers. Therefore, just like the "total quality management" in the 20th century to ensure the high quality of industrial products, the "comprehensive innovation governance" must be adopted in the 21st century to guarantee the innovation of knowledge products.
Two
The necessity of University Innovation governance is very popular as an academic and policy discourse in the practice of higher education, but in terms of the organizational structure and institutional arrangement of universities, it does not match the concept of governance. A lot of work in universities is still based on the bureaucratic system, which is dominated by the administrative management of functional departments. The academic discussion about university governance also focuses on the management level, trying to deal with the past affairs belonging to management in the way of governance, which is suspected of governance for governance. Compared with the focus on governance, most of the research on innovation in academia confines its definition of innovation to the step of concept generation and design definition, while few studies focus on the organizational structure of innovation governance. For universities, governance is a tool, not an end. The governance of a university must serve its central task. With the connotation of governance becoming more and more extensive, it is necessary to know clearly the boundary and direction of university governance, which core affairs of university are unsolvable and which may not belong to the scope of governance at all. Those who need governance should strengthen their governance system and capacity, and those who don't need governance should strive to improve their professional management level.
Nowadays, as the engine of innovation, universities urgently need to strengthen innovation governance. "The essence of knowledge is heterogeneous and distributed: it is the result of interaction of multiple technical modules and processes with different characteristics and division of labor. This determines that innovation is always inseparable from knowledge transaction, communication and coordination costs of different degrees. The system should be innovated in the most efficient way by combining internal and external technical resources