Companies and universities: a little learning
Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, suggests in the latest Harvard Business Review that the American research university, eg Harvard, might be a model for the company of the future. Instead, they should adopt the research university's fluid and decentralised approach to creativity and hierarchy. "If you look at the organisations in the economy where the greatest value is being added", argues Mr. Summers, "they are increasingly the organisations that share the values and character of universities."
They are, to start with, extraordinarily durable insitutions. Mr Summers' own Harvard, founded in 1636, is very young compared with the University of Bologna, founded in 1080, or Paris and Oxford born less than a century later.
In the rich world alone, 39m people are now taking a university course of one sort or another. And they teach more subjects than ever before. Anyone tempted to mock McDonald's Hamburger University should look at the classes in food technology and catering that plenty of modern universities now provide.
The successful university has other characteristics that firms uincreasingly aspire to. Moreover, the deals struck by the most successful academics when they transfer from one university (often European) to another (usually American) are becoming more lucrative, with all sorts of perks regarded as normal.
But there is one big difference that Mr. Summers does not mention. Harvard's students may pay for their teaching, but the university's research, which Mr. Summers urges firms to copy, is subsidised with public money.
Public support gives most universities a financial stability that companies do not enjoy. Sure, companies succeed on the back of big ideas, but on the whole it is their application that makes money. That is why clever 25-year-old graduates rearely run durably successful companies, even if they are from Harvard.
a. to put a good idea effectively and profitably into practice generally requires managerial experience and authority.
b. He does not mean that firms should set up their own "universities" - although plenty, from Motorola to McDonald's, have done that.
c. Universities everywhere are largely state-financed.
d. They are all hugely successful: there are far more of them, and far more students, than ever ebfore.
e. Certainly, there are aspects of the university that firms might envy.
f. For example it gathers, under a single powerful brand, individuals contracted to supply it with their intelligence.
TOPIC: WHAT MIGHT THE COMPANY OF THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE?
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