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The primary mission of universities worldwide is to educate and conduct basic research.  However, there is a growing trend that shows institutes of higher learning are also expected to contribute to economic development through technology commercialisation and industry engagement.

There are concerns that an over-emphasis by public policymakers on universities to create economic impact may shift funding from longer-term basic research to shorter-term applied studies.  As a result, this “third” mission may distract universities from achieving their main goals.

To address this concern, American political scientist Donald E. Stokes in 1997 proposed a conceptual model of scientific research motivations that has two dimensions – scientific impact and commercial relevance. While Stokes’ model is popular in public policy discourse, it has received surprisingly little empirical attention in the academic literature, due mainly to a lack of consensus on how to operationalise the measurement of the two key dimensions in Stokes Model.

Looking to bridge this empirical knowledge gap are Professor Wong Poh Kam and Professor Gao Jian at NUS Business School and Tsinghua School of Economics & Management (SEM), respectively who initiated a collaborative research project to provide comparable empirical estimates of Stokes’ Quadrants for the National University of Singapore, Tsinghua University and Stanford University.

Join us to find out the key findings from this comparative research project and their implications for university governance.