Abstract:

In this highly changing technological world, if the universities do not innovate properly by conducting sophisticated and well-rounded research, they themselves are not only falling behind but also the countries themselves are falling behind; hence, most of the governments put development of innovation by means of the universities, particularly research universities. Unlike in the other centuries, in the 21st century the universities should perform advance pure science as well as applied science and develop new critical technologies in order to empower the political and economic systems in these competitive global ecosystems. Additionally, the collaboration and cooperation among the universities, the industries, and the governments are not enough to empower neither local innovation nor global innovation. For that reason, the numbers of the patents as well as the number of the licensed patents have become important together with the research paper citations. More importantly, innovative companies and startups play important and crucial roles in the development of innovation. For instance in the case of Stanford, the students and faculty members generate $2.7 trillion as annual revenue-equivalent to the 10th largest economy in the world (Thomson Reuters, 2016).

In order to analyze the impact of the research universities on the innovation development, the well-rounded qualitative research had been conducted. The data were collected through focus group interviews with the university managers (n=7), the researchers (n=25), and the academic members (n=34) from the 3 research universities in Turkey in which ten public universities were selected in 2017 as research universities among other public universities.
The collected data had been systematically analyzed by asking 21 open-ended questions, and the classified qualitative data had been critically analyzed by using NVivo.

The analyzed data had showed that the innovation development was so new for the research universities in Turkey that the ecosystems had not been ready yet to meet the needs as in the global world. Even though the managers at the universities were more aware about the requirements, the researchers and the academic members did not know how they could improve the innovation at their universities. Additionally, although they have knowledge in terms of dissemination though academic papers, few participants were aware about the patent filings, licensing, intellectual property, technology valuation, startup ecosystem, venture capital, and exit strategies. More importantly, the legal ecosystem was not ready to support such a kind of activities in order to accelerate the environment. Particularly, the university-industry partnership is comparatively weaker than the other ecosystem to encourage innovation.

In conclusion, the results clarified that the new system were crucially needed for research universities on the innovation development in Turkey although there was a strong intention in changing the universities. In that sense, good examples could be developed as cases whereby the impacts of the research universities would be strongly developed.

Keywords:

Higher Education, Universities, Research Universities, Higher Education Management, Innovation, Innovation Development, Patents, Licensing, IP, Technology Valuation