INNOVATIONS IN KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING FOR COMPETITIVE HIGHER EDUCATION IN ASIA AND THE PACIFIC
Jouko Sarvi
Hitendra Pillay
© 2015 Asian Development Bank
6 ADB Avenue, Mandaluyong City, 1550 Metro Manila, Philippines
Tel +63 2 632 4444; Fax +63 2 636 2444
www.adb.org; openaccess.adb.org
Some rights reserved. Published in 2015.
Printed in the Philippines.
ISBN 978-92-9257-262-4 (Print), 978-92-9257-263-1 (e-ISBN)
Publication Stock No. RPT157786-2.
Cataloging-In-Publication Data
J. Sarvi and H. Pillay.
Innovations in knowledge and learning for competitive higher education in Asia and the Pacific region. Mandaluyong City, Philippines: Asian Development Bank, 2015.
1. Education. 2. Higher education. 3. Communication and technology. I. Asian Development Bank.
The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) or its Board of Governors or the governments they represent.
ADB does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this publication and accepts no responsibility for any consequence of their use. The mention of specific companies or products of manufacturers does not imply that they are endorsed or recommended by ADB in preference to others of a similar nature that are not mentioned.
By making any designation of or reference to a particular territory or geographic area, or by using the term “country” in this document, ADB does not intend to make any judgments as to the legal or other status of any territory or area.
This work is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 IGO license (CC BY 3.0 IGO) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/. By using the content of this publication, you agree to be bound by the terms of said license as well as the Terms of Use of the ADB Open Access Repository at openaccess.adb.org/termsofuse
This CC license does not apply to non-ADB copyright materials in this publication. If the material is attributed to another source, please contact the copyright owner or publisher of that source for permission to reproduce it. ADB cannot be held liable for any claims that arise as a result of your use of the material.
Attribution—In acknowledging ADB as the source, please be sure to include all of the following information:
Author. Year of publication. Title of the material. © Asian Development Bank [and/or Publisher]. https://openaccess.adb.org. Available under a CC BY 3.0 IGO license.
Translations—Any translations you create should carry the following disclaimer:
Originally published by the Asian Development Bank in English under the title [title] © [Year of publication] Asian Development Bank. All rights reserved. The quality of this translation and its coherence with the original text is the sole responsibility of the [translator]. The English original of this work is the only official version.
Adaptations—Any adaptations you create should carry the following disclaimer:
This is an adaptation of an original Work © Asian Development Bank [Year]. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of ADB or its Board of Governors or the governments they represent. ADB does not endorse this work or guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this publication and accepts no responsibility for any consequence of their use.
Please contact [email protected] or [email protected] if you have questions or comments with respect to content, or if you wish to obtain copyright permission for your intended use that does not fall within these terms, or for permission to use the ADB logo.
Note: In this publication, “$” refers to US dollars.
ADB recognizes “Hong Kong” as Hong Kong, China and “Korea” as the Republic of Korea.
Executive Summary
Competitive advantage in a knowledge economy is dependent on the ability to innovate and create new knowledge products and services, and to find innovative applications for them. Higher education institutions (HEIs), traditionally, have been considered key agents for human resource development and thus strongly influence countries’ capacity to innovate and become competitive. However, HEIs in Asia and the Pacific, modelled on industrial age thinking that demands excellence in routinized capacities, lack the ability to innovate and create new knowledge enterprises. Consequently, appreciating innovations and creative enterprise requires new lenses; replicating more of the same capacities will not be enough. The transition to a knowledge economy has situated the higher education sector amid an increasingly rapid transformation in education, across dimensions of purpose, content, pedagogy, and methodologies. Technology, social change, increased demand, and the decades-long trend of ever-increasing costs and very supply-side planning have left us with multiple challenges and the need to be highly innovative in an educational culture that tends to be wary of change.
The traditional thinking that HEIs are the sole custodians of knowledge and have the prerogative to determine what constitutes competitive knowledge, innovation, and creative enterprise is being challenged by external nontraditional stakeholders. Increasingly, industry and field experts, among whom much of new knowledge innovation happens, are becoming significant players in the higher education landscape—comprising teaching, research, and community engagement. Therefore, there is pressure to involve professional bodies, industry experts, think tanks, research institutes, and other field experts/practitioners in not just planning program content and delivery processes to stimulate knowledge creation and application, but also as alternative providers of higher education services.
The constructs and typologies of different knowledge types need serious review in order to produce higher education graduates who can be creative and innovate rather than merely excelling in performing routine tasks. Recent research suggests various insights concerning knowledge architecture and classifications aligned with the aspiration for a knowledge economy. Irrespective of the knowledge classification, the common message is a need for convergence of different knowledge types. The traditional model of ”artificial separation of knowledge vs. skills” or soft vs hard knowledge and skills may no longer be relevant. Convergence helps us appreciate the integrated nature of knowledge as it is applied in an everyday context and is central to creativity and innovativeness—one cannot think in silos and be productive in a knowledge economy. This presents challenges for structuring higher education programs when traditional faculty boundaries and ”conventional wisdom” regarding appropriate content are still very much the norm. Furthermore, research and analytical thinking can no longer be left to postgraduate work. In most developed economies these types of knowledge innovation capacities are initiated in undergraduate programs.