Is innovation a useful concept for arts and humanities research?

Defining innovation

There are many classifications of innovation in the literature, but the simple one of something new that is put into practical use may cover them sufficiently (Fagerberg, 2005). This means that new research results, discoveries and breakthroughs are not innovations in themselves. For science-based innovations, there is often a lag of decades between discoveries and practical applications, and the path between the two is filled with strange turns and loops (Rosenberg and Nelson, 1994). Even technological and natural science research is rarely a direct driving force in innovation processes (Kline and Rosenberg, 1986), and it can initially be assumed that this is also the case for social science and humanities research.

The current perspective on innovation furthermore favours a wider set of phenomena than new technological products and ways of making them. Innovation researchers have consistently shown how innovation can be found in low-tech industries, service industries and outside of private firms (Pavitt, 2005; Tidd and Bessant, 2013). Public sector and non-profit organisations and services can be renewed, reshaped and improved in ways that fit the basic idea of innovation as something new implemented in practice (Tidd and Bessant, 2013; Windrum and Koch, 2008). This perspective is not least seen in Europe and in the Innovation Union strategy from 2010, establishing a ‘public sector innovation scoreboard’, a research programme and an international prize for public agencies (EU, 2013). Innovation is furthermore no longer seen as something that needs to imply commercial value. For example, the term ‘social innovation’ is often used to denote activities in which the social aims take priority (there may be economic aspects involved), such as fair trade, e-learning and microcredit in poor countries (Sharra and Nyssens, 2010). The implication is that innovation has become more relevant for all scientific disciplines, not least the humanities, where many of the graduates have traditionally found work in public and non-profit organisations.

It should also be mentioned that many organisations struggle to achieve innovation (Christensen, 2011). It is often met with resistance and understood poorly (Pavitt, 2005; van de Ven et al., 2008). Innovation processes are risky, uncertain and with political characteristics; they require support, championing and alliance-building. Societies that want to promote innovation resulting in improved public services, new jobs in the private sector and strengthened social capital, need candidates from the education system good at dealing with these types of processes. Innovation capacity therefore requires a fundamental understanding of the human dimension to change and that is partly where the humanities – and the higher education system more broadly – comes in.

HEIs and innovation

As seen so far, scientific research and higher education candidates matter for renewal in industry, the public sector and non-profit organisations. But what is more concretely the role of universities and other HEIs in innovation? Generally speaking, there is a bias in the academic literature and policy documents in favour of research activities, based on a flawed belief that scientific results are the primary input into innovation processes. In particular, commercialisation of academic science through patenting, licensing and the creation of spin-off companies is an activity that receives too much attention compared to its volume and significance (Abreu and Grinevich, 2013; Bekkers and Freitas, 2008; Mowery and Sampat, 2005). But this form of contribution to innovation is an exception and seldom happens with much success outside of a minority of well-funded HEIs. From an innovation perspective, training of a nation’s future workforce is a more crucial activity than basic research. Common to both these activities, however, is that the contribution to innovation is indirect; teaching graduates who later become involved in innovative work and providing for a general public knowledge that can be accessed by anyone with a problem to find potential solutions (Gulbrandsen, 2011).

Yet, there are strategies where HEIs can get involved more directly, and the indirect role they most often play does not mean that innovation happens automatically or uninfluenced by HEI actions (Rasmussen et al., 2013). Innovation is a phenomenon that largely takes place outside of universities and colleges – in private firms, non-profit organisations, civil society and the public sector. A general recommendation from the innovation literature is therefore that HEIs need to be open to many kinds of societal interaction to become engaged in innovation processes (Rosenberg and Nelson, 1994). The idea is not primarily that HEIs should become better at transferring their results and perspectives, but rather that a continuing interaction may lead to subtle changes in the way teaching, research and dissemination are carried out. Interaction with society can be beneficial to research quality: for example, academics with industrial or other societal collaboration generate more, and more highly cited, publications (e.g. Gulbrandsen and Smeby, 2005; Larsen, 2011), as long as extreme levels of commercial or societal engagement are avoided.

The university–industry relations literature has conceptualised interaction as involving various channels of communication between the two parties (Bekkers and Freitas, 2008) leading to different forms of impact (Spaapen and van Drooge, 2011). Some channels are indirect, for example when users read publications by academics, which is a very common form of knowledge exchange. Collaborative research is an example of direct interaction. Empirical investigations have shown that academic researchers and industry respondents are very much in agreement about the most important channels: regular scientific publications and popular science publications, followed by transfer of students and other personnel (Bekkers and Freitas, 2008). Conversely, patenting and other direct commercialisation activities are rarely deemed crucial, whereas collaborative research and various types of consultancy and advice are seen as moderately important. Impacts are often indirect and happen after a considerable time lag (Spaapen and van Drooge, 2011). Although one should not underestimate tensions between academics and societal actors concerning aspects such as time frames and perspectives on utility, the central expectation from key societal actors is still that academics should concentrate on high-quality teaching and research (Mowery and Sampat, 2005).

Traditionally, the most innovative HEIs have been quick to change teaching programmes and curricula in response to new societal needs, not least in the engineering disciplines, mostly related to developing specific subjects rather than an explicit emphasis on innovation courses (Rosenberg and Nelson, 1994). In recent years, there has also been an increase in courses for social science and humanities students in ‘innovation and entrepreneurship’, but the courses are often small, and their effects seem to be limited (Gulbrandsen, 2011). One important context for changes in curricula and research orientation is that the capacity and capabilities of external stakeholders are in many cases a more severe bottleneck in fruitful knowledge exchange than the ‘relevance’ of the academic activities (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990; Rosenberg and Nelson, 1994). Given that the challenge of innovation processes is rarely a lack of ideas (they tend to proliferate) but the corresponding ability to put ideas into practice (van de Ven et al., 2008), courses focused exclusively on creativity may have little impact.

Are these observations and findings also relevant for the humanities? All scientific fields make some claims to exclusivity, and there are certainly differences between them. But when it comes to societal engagement, a main argument is often that the hard sciences, unlike the humanities, are seen to yield immediate benefits and engage in frequent direct interaction with external stakeholders (cf. Olmos Peñuela et al., 2015). The brief literature review in this article shows that this is not the case. The indirect and long-term nature of scientific impact and the low importance of technology transfer and commercialisation are shared by all scientific disciplines, making it more difficult for arts and humanities representatives to retreat from discussions about innovation. On one hand, this constitutes an opportunity to discuss the societal relevance of arts and humanities in new ways and to highlight communalities across the disciplinary spectrum. On the other hand, this is also challenging, as it raises questions about how the innovation and societal engagement challenges are handled.

Linkages between HEIs and society vary with sector, academic discipline, type of institution and many other aspects, including individual preferences – some simply find it more stimulating to engage heavily in activities leading to practical utility (Gulbrandsen et al., 2011). Their academic careers often look quite different from that of some of their peers. We know that arts and humanities researchers are relatively speaking more often involved in consultancy, popular science publishing and public debates in the media and elsewhere, and comparative investigations refute the notion that they are ‘less relevant’ (e.g. Abreu and Grinevich, 2013; Hughes et al., 2011; Olmos-Peñuela et al., 2015). But these disciplines are also characterised by large variations in innovation and societal engagement – down to the individual level. This heterogeneity may be one of the main reasons for the oversimplifications and misinterpretations encountered in public policies and university strategies.

Bias in HEI innovation policies and strategies

In other words, the university–industry relations literature suggests that successful innovation strategies often involve academic institutions concentrating on good research, teaching and dissemination and striving for a certain degree of willing interaction with relevant societal agents. This is to a large degree based on empirical investigations of how innovations actually happen instead of ideologically infused perspectives on what universities should (and should not) be. But university administrators, academics and policymakers often seem to have other more normative perspectives in mind when wanting to promote innovation and increase the ‘societal relevance’ of universities, leading to various biases. The following discussion is largely based on the authors’ engagement with policies and strategies in the Nordic region since the mid-1990s.

One common strategy is to try to emulate what has happened elsewhere, but without thoroughly understanding the context and the factors leading up to the success. Waves of legislative changes, science parks, biotechnology research centres and technology transfer offices (TTOs) can probably be at least partly related to the success of a few very visible US universities and regions, with Stanford/Silicon Valley and MIT/Route 128 as the global archetypes of accomplishment (Mowery and Sampat, 2005). But without a very strong biotechnology base, for example, biotechnology commercialisation is most likely not going to be a major success, even with a support system in place. Often, such initiatives are oriented at creating new ideas and entrepreneurial ventures, but as mentioned, the main challenge in innovation is mostly related to implementation and creating good user linkages (van de Ven et al., 2008).

Many countries have adopted a narrow techno-economic perspective in their higher education and innovation policies (cf. Bullen et al., 2004; Molas-Gallert 2015; Hazelkorn, 2015). This may be seen as the source of a number of problematic responses by HEIs. One is a tendency to reduce innovation to imply creating new firms. Academics and students learn to write business plans and enter into competitions where the best ideas are awarded a small sum of money, encouraged by a flourishing support structure. Entrepreneurship support may be needed, of course, and there may be an untapped potential when it comes to encouraging new ways of thinking and alternative careers among the students, also in the humanities. The main problem with this approach is the singular emphasis on new firm creation: Many universities are not very good at it, and the simple indicators of ‘number of new firms’ and ‘number of new jobs’ disguise and distort the many other important influences that HEIs can have on innovation. HEIs are of course aware of this, but they may be worried about losing legitimacy and resources. This can also lead to symbolic processes or attempts at gaining recognition and ‘increasing the visibility’ of existing activities rather than a genuine wish to commit to innovation.

Some HEIs see innovation and its support as something that should happen outside of its core units and activities – Stankiewicz (1986) calls this externalisation. Innovation only enters the picture after research and teaching is carried out in the usual way, and it is dealt with by TTOs and other units that have little interaction with the centres and departments of the university. The challenges are similar to the ones emerging from a narrow view of innovation: externalisation grossly underestimates the many direct linkages between core academic activities and society.

Tensions arise because of these biases, and the most important is probably related to indicators. This is where we find the clearest gap between what we know about innovation and how it is dealt with in practice. Although we know that innovation processes take a long time and that the central influences of HEIs are indirect, the most frequently used indicators tend to measure only the direct and often quite short-term impacts, such as patenting and number of firms created (cf. Benneworth, 2015). This is particularly a challenge when we talk about arts and humanities, where many researchers are somewhat sceptical towards indicators to begin with (even the ones they may excel in, such as media attention and popular science publishing). Their scepticism is not reduced by the fact that many policymakers seem to prefer the techno-economic indicators of commercialisation or poorly defined notions of ‘creative industries’. Tensions may also ensue when academics’ well-grounded scepticism towards some indicators or an unbalanced set of indicators is interpreted by external stakeholders as unwillingness to engage in activities that are increasingly seen as central for universities.

But how are these tensions handled? How do misunderstandings and biases play out in practice? These questions will be shed light on using the example of the University of Oslo in Norway, drawing on substantial archival material collected for the 200^th anniversary of the university in 2011 (Gulbrandsen, 2011).

Employability of university graduates

Significant research funding and research policy as a distinct policy area only materialised in Norway after WW2, but this marked the beginning of a period of steady growth both in research funding and student numbers. New research councils were established, including one for basic research with support for the humanities. Apart from the special cases of professional training of medical doctors and others, the university trained students through three levels: similar to bachelor (3 years), intermediary level (1 year) and master level with high demands to thesis work (2 years). Most of the graduates from these university programmes, which were mostly open to all who satisfied the minimum demands, found jobs as teachers in the secondary school system.

From the 1960s, several significant changes were seen in the labour market. The first ones to experience this were the natural sciences, where industry started hiring a much larger proportion of the graduates, whilst questioning the relevance of their skills. Leading representatives of firms and the national industry association accused the University of neglecting the needs of firms, to which the Rector and others replied that firms had not shown any interest in the university either, setting off a debate about ‘isolation’ that would continue for decades. The university started a large new course for advanced level graduates in 1966, with guest lecturers from industry and applied research institutes, and with introductory lectures to topics such as marketing, production and quality control, computer programming, industrial policy and accounting. It was later moved to the social science faculty and is now a master’s level ‘critical management’ programme largely for students from social science and humanities.

For the humanities, labour market problems started in the 1970s. An increasing share of advanced level students could not find relevant jobs, and in worrying numbers, no job at all. There were fewer teacher positions available, and attempts were made to persuade private companies to hire humanities graduates. For example, the year 1977 saw a big company survey, several meetings and information campaigns about the applicable expertise of the graduates. That year, there were 60 unemployed philologists alone, with a contemporaneous study estimating that the share of them becoming teachers would decrease from 85 to 60%, which by extrapolation to 1990 would lead 10,000 philologists into the national open labour market. Philology and other humanities disciplines did not have an oil and gas industry screaming for graduates.

National media raised critical voices in a debate about the relevance of the humanities that has continued ever since. A good example can be found in the University of Oslo’s own magazine, which had a special issue on ‘The humanities and industry’ in 1984: external stakeholders voiced three areas of criticism. First, the humanities disciplines had too traditional ideas about careers for their graduates. Little thought was given to other alternatives than a teaching career, and students learned little about topics such as innovation, entrepreneurship and the use of modern technology. Second, the humanities were criticised for insufficiently varied study programmes. Most were classroom and lecture based, and there was negligible practical project work or assignments related to outside perspectives. Third, some academic units were criticised for having a ‘fanatic aversion to industry’, partly as a trait of disciplinary cultures and partly as a result of the political radicalisation of the university from the end of the 1960s. Leading politicians joined the industrial representatives in claiming that the University was ‘isolated’ and that it needed a ‘change of culture’.

The initial response to the challenges and the criticism was to set up a number of practical courses for late-stage humanities students. In particular, the course ‘IT for humanists’, giving basic skills in word processing and other software, was so popular that access had to be restricted. From the 1990s, a course in ‘Entrepreneurship and innovation for humanists’ has been run every year, although its effects have not been evaluated. Various attempts have also been made for several decades to get humanities students to write their theses in collaboration with outside organisations, although the number has generally been low. The setup of new courses typically followed the externalist approach, but the general perception has been that there is a deeper challenge for the humanities that requires further shifts in research orientation and societal engagement. These shifts started to appear in the 1980s in light of a rapidly changing industrial structure in Norway.

Societal interest in university research

The shift that started in the 1980s was driven in particular by increased R&D elsewhere in society, particularly, in industry. Norwegian firms quadrupled their expenditure on R&D during the decade, fuelled by the oil and gas sector’s rapid growth as well as developments within areas such as implementation of ICT, biotechnology, fish farming breakthroughs and environmental technology. With increased absorptive capacity, firms sought more collaboration with HEIs to gain access to graduates and because their products and processes were increasingly knowledge-intensive.

For the University of Oslo, this largely meant improving the interface between academia and industry. A secretariat for externally funded activities was established to deal with the formal issues related to contracts and money. An Innovation Centre followed shortly thereafter, along with a Research Foundation oriented at initiating new and cross-disciplinary research efforts, including the humanities. The Innovation Centre’s task was initially planned to be a link between researchers and industry – to help companies get in touch with university employees and to help researchers with ideas with practical potential. However, its main and dominating mission eventually turned out to be managing the process of building a science park next to the university. The park was planned in a period of strong economic growth, but it opened in 1989 in a time of crisis and rising unemployment.

Many of the activities in these organisations were oriented at the hard sciences, but it was continuously repeated that the soft sciences ‘should also be on board’. This was more than lip service; key actors genuinely wanted to include humanities perspectives in many of the new activities and succeeded to some extent. The Innovation Centre contributed to establishing an incubator for firms started by arts and humanities students, new humanities research groups found localities in the science park and the Foundation established some cross-disciplinary activities where the hard and soft sciences met. The University Rector who served for most of the decade came from the Faculty of Theology, and he stated that the goal of the new innovation-oriented activities should be that there would be ‘a philosopher in every board of every stock exchange-listed company’.

This desire to include the humanities had several explanations. The most straightforward one was that key figures believed in the innovative potential and societal/industrial relevance of the soft sciences. For example, the introduction of ICT in traditional industries had shown that main challenges in such processes were often not technological but related to cultural, structural and ethical aspects of modern-day working life. A political explanation is also relevant: the new innovation support initiatives challenged the fragile balance between the different faculties at the university, and several actors expressed fears that the Innovation Centre and Science Park would contribute to reallocating funding from the ‘less useful sciences’ to the ‘more useful ones’, as one professor put it.

Including the humanities helped calm the opponents, and all faculties voted for the construction of the science park. Creative funding models were sought where the university could spend interest on current and future external research funding, which in practice meant that the University got a science park built without spending any of its own grants. The Innovation Centre and Research Foundation were expected to become self-sufficient, an unrealistic ambition that led to a major conflict at the end of the 1980s, which culminated in the merger of all these organisations into the science park administration. The park remains active and has built four new buildings following the first one, but has never realised its ambition to become the central meeting place between all academic disciplines and society. And despite some new research initiatives, the humanities link to innovation in society was not much more visible after these new formal mechanisms were put in place. The hard sciences benefited from the increase in industrial R&D, but there was no similar process related to the humanities, even though they had been part of the new university infrastructure and cross-disciplinary initiatives.

Action plan for innovation

The years after the shift into a new millennium may have been the most turbulent in the university’s history when it comes to innovation. At the beginning of the 2000s, torchlight rallies were organised in Oslo with many leading academics from the humanities taking part under banners such as ‘No to commercialisation of research’. This was chiefly related to worries about budget cuts and changes in research council funding. It signalled scepticism about how universities were treated, with widespread feelings that the pressure on societal usefulness had become too strong. Yet, at the end of the decade, the University adopted a strategic plan defining innovation as one of its four core missions (along with teaching, research and dissemination), and in 2013, an Action Plan for Innovation was implemented with the Faculty of Humanities as one of the most eager participants. What had happened?

This third shift was related to changes in research and higher education policy and to a stronger internal acceptance of the university’s responsibilities for societal engagement and new ways of seeing it. Policymakers initially pushed for more commercialisation of academic research right after the millennium shift, believing that there were practical barriers to exploitation and entrepreneurship. Legislative changes in 2003 gave the intellectual property rights to research results to the university (earlier the individual academics had those rights) and formalised HEIs’ responsibility for ensuring that ‘research results benefit society’. The University of Oslo decided to establish a TTO, with some tensions related to its funding. From the beginning, the TTO wanted to ‘work equally with all disciplines’, and it initially started a publishing house, viewing books as a ‘commercial product’ from the soft sciences. This approach was not successful, and the TTO later evolved into a unit specialised towards commercialisation support to ideas originating in life sciences and natural sciences. Clearer TTO specialisation has apparently been beneficial for the services to the hard sciences and also made the staff from social science and humanities feel more at liberty to pursue other activities.

Although policymakers certainly would have liked to see more spin-off companies and jobs created by academics and students, they also have grown more realistic in their expectations. The overall rhetoric has changed, reflecting the expansion of the concept of innovation from something creating economic value to something that can be valuable in other ways. White papers on research and innovation have invoked the ‘grand challenges’ and ‘societal challenges’, and they have been defined in ways that are clearly relevant to arts and humanities scholars, related for example to the cultural sector in an era of globalisation, and to immigration issues.

The University of Oslo in response defined 2013 as its ‘Year of Innovation’ and made an action plan to support it, involving a cross-disciplinary group of academics and administrators. Much work was put into making sensible definitions of innovation and in presenting a broad set of examples related to teaching, research and dissemination. The humanities representative was particularly active and important in this process, compiling a document showcasing many examples of innovation-relevant activities within the humanities, ranging from various projects within ‘digital humanities’ to large-scale collaborative projects with industry and the creative sector. The final plan contained goals, four pages of definitions and examples and concrete actions to be taken within leadership and personnel policies, teaching and knowledge exchange with external actors and improved promotion of existing innovative work. In the follow-up to the plan, the Faculty of Humanities was active, and spent some of its own strategic funds on supporting initiatives such as new forms of project work for students and incentives for externally funded project engagement.

Whether the plan and other initiatives will lead to important new results remain to be seen, but the process is much less characterised by conflicts and tensions than one would expect from earlier decades’ attempts at similar actions. The broad definition of innovation used seems at least partially responsible for this reduced tension level, and at least some leading humanities professors have found innovation to be a useful concept for describing some of their scholarly activities. At the University of Oslo, this may also be related to changes in academic leadership, with a rector and deans supporting the new perspectives, and to a generation shift where some younger academics have had alternative ideas and backgrounds. In sum, this could signify an increased awareness and understanding of the process of innovation and be suggestive of the realisation of the long called-for change in academic culture.

Indicator tensions

These are probably hard to avoid and difficult to deal with. We know that innovation takes a long time and, with most often, an indirect role for HEIs. Supporting patenting and entrepreneurship processes can in some cases be necessary, but patents and new companies remain rare outputs of universities, even from the hard sciences, and these cannot therefore be the only indicators. But it is hard to find agreement on any indicators, including the ones related to the core activities of teaching and research. In Norway, two committees have failed to come up with a set of indicators of dissemination (number of popular books, newspaper articles, readers, viewers, etc.), dissemination being an indicator some humanities researchers have wanted but other have opposed. The University of Oslo has implemented six indicators for the budgeting process with fairly little opposition. The way to handle the tension seems to be to choose the most uncontroversial indicators (student throughput, research council funding and so on) and to compare all faculties only with their own past performance rather than with other faculties.

Quality tensions

Will societal engagement reduce the quality of teaching, research and scholarship? Are universities too preoccupied with their teaching and research to become involved in innovation? These worries are frequently encountered in the debate about the humanities and about universities. The empirical literature clearly finds that the most important contribution of HEIs in innovation emerges through high-quality teaching and research and that academics with a high level of external engagement generally also have a high-scholarly standing. These two findings may in themselves reduce some tensions related to the innovation concept and suggest that the main strategy of HEIs should be to do their core missions as well as possible. However, this does not mean that quality and innovation comprise a tension-free relationship. First, tensions may be encountered in situations where there is a low-absorptive capacity in society, with few potential collaboration partners and few employers valuing the best graduates. For research universities, partnerships with local colleges and similar organisations could be a way to deal with this problem. Second, the positive relationship between innovation/societal contributions and quality does not mean that it is easily achieved in funding structures that try to achieve this synergy during the course of specific research projects – it may just as well be a longer-term effect of opportunities for long-term scientific work and positive relations to non-academic communities (Gulbrandsen and Smeby, 2005). We also know that different types of universities and colleges have different contributions to innovation processes in society, which may mean that a more nuanced quality discourse than scientific excellence is needed. The university–industry relations literature has shown that collaboration with university departments with low ratings in academic excellence may lead to useful results in external partnering organisations.

Teaching versus research tensions

Much innovation support is biased in favour of research activities: more research collaboration, more ideas based on research results, more exploitation of these ideas and so on. For individual academics, the main promotion criteria remain related to research in most countries. But as we have seen, teaching is a central contribution to innovation in society by HEIs, and the current and former students are of course a valuable source of new initiatives and experiences about how their training fits their careers. Many linkage mechanisms between universities and potential employers are initiated by students, who are often motivated by practice and project work related to problems in their local communities. Perhaps, most importantly, it is good graduates that give firms, government and civil society the capacity to absorb university knowledge and apply it effectively for innovation, and the broader idea of social innovation implies that humanities graduates are as important for this capacity as their ‘hard’ science equivalents.

Infrastructure tensions

The University of Oslo case implies that a fairly specialised support structure for innovation may be better than one organisational unit offering services to all disciplines. This means that humanities may need to think seriously about the type of support they need to become more engaged with society. An infrastructure does not come for free, however. Although innovation may be desirable from a societal point of view, and it may also be desirable that HEIs get more involved in innovation processes, the actual benefits from this will in most cases not be reaped by the universities and colleges. Linkage and transfer initiatives are costly, and unless HEIs can redistribute money from teaching, research and administration, other sources of funding need to be found. Many initiatives have failed due to unrealistic expectations of self-sufficiency or fears that something else will suffer from budget cuts. Innovation is neither useful for arts and humanities scholars nor for anyone else if it becomes an activity that competes with education and research.

The main message in this article is that the expansion of the innovation concept has a great deal to offer understanding of the societal contribution of the humanities if applied in a nuanced way. More than ever, the humanities’ research activities and graduates can easily be tied to well-communicated societal goals and absorptive capacity. This constitutes an opportunity that can be exploited if some of the tensions surrounding innovation can be avoided. But the caveat is that there is a strong tendency among policymakers, university leaders and academics themselves to stick to narrow innovation perspectives: as something technological, as something economic or as something where the main challenge is to create new knowledge and ideas. Although arts and humanities scholars may escape some of the most instrumental calls for innovation and utility by adopting a narrow perspective, the danger is that they put themselves at risk by under-communicating their actual and potential contribution to innovation in society.