Commercialisation, Science and Academic Standards

Last November we carried a story on this blog about institutional and process issues in science commercialisation.There we said in part:

When some of us first became involved in science commercialisation more than twenty years ago, a core concern was the need to bring universities and other scientific research bodies more effectively into the commercialisation process, to break them out of the academic ghetto.

While this is still important, we now have concerns that the focus on commercialisation and the associated search for commercial funding has become too great and may in fact be distorting our academic structures.

This remains our view. The issue has now become a popular topic of discussion in Australia as part of the overall changes being forced upon the university sector by the Australian Government.