Entrepreneurial universities

The University of the Philippines was planned by the Americans as the primary leadership training institution. Before 1908, there was no non-sectarian university in the country, no public institution to train, educate and nurture the future leadership of the Philippines.

UP discharged that role quite successfully, producing leaders in government, the judiciary, military and the academe. It provided world class education in medicine, law, agriculture, arts and letters, architecture and engineering.

Not until the 80s did private institutions begin to emerge and aggressively share that leadership task. They evolved from modest colleges to become full-fledged universities, graduating a generation of top business people, accountants, engineers.

Today, the competition among universities is stronger than ever, with about five million students in tertiary education. To keep their place, universities must be able to compete in a highly-globalized dynamic world where trained manpower and knowledge-intensive services are in great demand.

In the Philippine context, few universities do research; most are mainly teaching-universities. However, the traditional mission of a university to teach, research and do outreach is gradually evolving to teaching, research and commercialization. The product of knowledge and research must be marketable so that they can continue to fund more research undertakings.

Universities like Harvard, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge are pouring resources into R&D and pursuing patent and licensing for their intellectual output. The National University of Singapore and the Seoul National University have forged linkages with industries – inventing, patenting and eventually profiting from their inventions.

Like these entrepreneurial universities, the academic programs and governing structures of higher education institutions in the Philippines must be redesigned to follow the international trend in innovation. Philippine universities must become a generator of ideas that will allow us to succeed in the wealth-creating fields of science, technology and innovation (STI).