Document Type

Conference Paper

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

5.3 EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES

Publication Details

UIIN Annual Conference, ‘Challenges and Solutions for Fostering Entrpreneurial Universities and Collaborative Innovation’, Barcelona, 24 April 2014.

Abstract

Irish universities are currently engaged in a process of shifting their reliance on state subvention as their primary source of income to one that includes developing new streams of non-exchequer funding. This scenario emerges from a long-term trend of reduced state subvention which was dramatically accelerated by the virtual collapse of the Irish economy, which required an external rescue package brokered with the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund (which became know as the Troika) from November 2010. While Ireland has officially exited this arrangement, its public finance will remain severely constrained for an extended period. In this paper we examine the potential of University-Business Cooperation (UBC) in lifelong learning, which has been identified as one of the key university responses to meet the projected shortfall arising from reduced state subvention. We suggest that this area has very high potential for universities, but it has to be underpinned by internal mechanisms to incentivise key university staff to engage proactively in order to meet the targets set by individual Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Implementing an incentivisation policy will require many of the HEIs to address their own internal culture and modus operandi for rewarding and promoting their staff.

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