Abstract:

The demand of innovation has been developing and transforming the higher education in which new understanding in research should be accepted in order to deal with this highly challenging demand. In other words, research does not guarantee innovation. Innovation demands that researchers at the universities use technology and innovation, including that of social innovation while re-engineering most of the higher education systems.

In this study, how innovation based research is taken into account by the researchers is studied in order to analyze the re-engineering process of higher education systems in Turkey in which higher education reform has encouraged, but not well internalized. Hence, the main reasons of the drawback in the internalization by the researchers have studied in order to improve the innovation-based research at the universities. Furthermore, the strategy of delivering innovation-based research is another perspective of this study to understand critically the implementation of innovation-based research in the successful cases.

By using qualitative study, the executives (n=14) and the researchers’ (n=36) perceptions and experiences from two public and two private universities in Istanbul were analyzed strategically. The following qualitative techniques were used to determine the perceptions and experiences: document analysis, online survey, and interviews. The ethnographic study was conducted by observing the perceptions and the experiences of the executives and researchers in order to understand deeply what was the meaning of innovation-based research. After studying for eight weeks in four different universities, 12 different semi-structured research questions were asked in interviews during the sessions. Then, the collected data were analyzed in Atlas.ti 7 in order to make detailed analyses by coding the data for deductive reasoning.

The results indicate that the innovation–based research is very new for the researcher, especially for those in the state universities. In the private universities, both the executives and the researchers are much more prepared for this kind of innovation-based research. However, those who have not studies abroad and do not have enough chance to experience the innovation-based research are not accepting or even they do not know how to conduct. More importantly, in the universities where the internalization is much more internalized, the executives choose right people who have better knowledge and experiences. Nevertheless, in the less internalized ones, the executives do not know and do not have enough experiences about innovation and innovation-based research. Hence, they choose people who are not aware about such a complicated subject. They have left the responsibilities to the other executives and researchers who are not qualified and experienced. Moreover, this issue has become personal rather than institutional long-term strategy. However, in those universities in which innovation-based research has become strategically critical, the executives as well as the researcher cooperate intensively for multidimensional aspects of innovation-based research. In that way, the ability of the universities in the innovation-based research has increased and seen in the ranking lists of the universities. They strategically and mutually adapt the needs and the requirements of the executives and the researchers in order to conduct highly competitive innovative-based research ecosystem.

Keywords:

Higher Education, Higher Education Management, Innovation based Research, Internalization of the Higher Education, Ranking Lists.