Premchand Palety is the chief executive of the Delhi-based multidisciplinary research company C fore All universities have the potential to catalyse massive industrial and socio-economic change in their local environments. A case in point is Stanford University. When the university was established in 1885 in Northern California™s Bay area, it was known primarily for its orchids with hardly any industry around it. But by nurturing and developing its unique research-based entrepreneurial culture, Stanford University has created a multi-billion dollar globally famous hi-tech industry in its neighbouring Silicon Valley and millions of technology jobs worldwide. It all began in 1939 with faculty member Frederick Terman encouraging two of his students ” William Hewlett and David Packard ” to incubate a new technology business within the Stanford campus by applying the university™s path-breaking ICT (information communication technology) research. Hewlett-Packard Inc was thus born with an investment of US $538 (Rs.33,893) in 1939. Since then, HP has blossomed into a transnational IT hardware, software and peripherals manufacturing behemoth with offices in more than 170 countries, annual revenue of $111.48 billion (Rs.700,824 crore) and a global headcount of 324,000 employees. After HP, more than 3,000 companies including Sun Microsystems, Google, Cisco Systems, eBay, Yahoo, Logitech and Dolby Labs were incubated as students™ projects in Stanford University. The relatively unsung Terman is to a great extent responsible for the ICT revolution that began in the mid-20th century and has radically transformed industry, communications and lifestyles of humankind. Though the first western universities sprang up in Paris and Bologna in the 12th century, Germany is the birthplace of the modern research university where teaching is supplemented with research and the creation of new knowledge. Defined by meritocracy and autonomy, these universities created and disseminated new information and knowledge. However in Germany, their growth and development was interrupted by the 30-years™ war in Europe culminating in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and in the 20th century by the two World Wars. Therefore American students and faculty who had either studied or taught in European, especially German universities, played a major role in developing and nurturing similar institutions in the then relatively isolationist USA. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1860), Cornell University (1868), Johns Hopkins (1876) and the University of Chicago (1890) were established in quick succession modelled on German research universities. After the American Civil War (1861-1865) when the US emerged as a major industrial power and enjoyed peace and a stable political environment, they blossomed and significantly influenced the socio-economic development of the country. Today, the American research university model has evolved into the gold standard of higher education and is being emulated by many countries. In India, for several reasons only a few universities have been successful in establishing themselves as research institutions, and therefore have had little success in catalysing industrial and socio-economic development. For the past 16 years, I have been actively involved in several initiatives which have evaluated institutes of higher education in India. As such, I have visited a large number…
