Edward Crawley, president of the SkolTech Institute on Science and Technology on cooperation with partnership companies and state-owned corporations, which will have to donate not less than one percent to SkolTech’s endowment.
Edward Crawley gave an interview on the back stage of the Educational Programs and Curriculum Design workshop, held in Moscow on March 15-16.
“Our intention (to cooperate with partnership companies) is similar to what many of the larger universities practice. And this is very much the same practice you can find at Cambridge, Stanford, or ETH, where they have this way of bringing in enterprise into the activity of the campus,” Crawley said. “For example, if you come to the ETH in Zurich you will see there most Swiss companies, or German-speaking companies, represented in industrial programs of the campus. There are different ways to do it, but the most important thing is that companies want to hire students. The scarcest commodity, the thing that is most lacking in most companies – is talent, human capital,” the SkolTech president said.
“So, the companies will naturally come to universities, because the university is the place, which will produce talented young people, who are, as we see it in this workshop today, very well prepared to work for the companies, and very well prepared for innovations,” commented Edward Crawley.
“And once the companies come, they will realize that they are really in competition for this talent and they will. They want to do things to actually engage themselves in the light of the university,” he said.
Crawley also stated that some cooperation with university could be as simple, as just putting a “flag” on the wall, saying “this company gave money for this room”. But more important is to engage companies into learning activity of the institute. “So, we expect the companies to be a part of learning activities, academic life of the university, not just waiting outside for the graduates,” he said.
As the SkolTech president said, “now there is another value proposition”. “We will be doing a research, which is very fundamental, but is viewed towards the application. The enterprises in this process can help us direct the research to some extend, so that it can be more quickly taken up by them, to be more valuable,” he said.
“And I think that if we do all these things, it would be a natural partnership between the state enterprises and SkolTech.” As he also said, the both sides will have to cooperate, from administrative treatment to research, but the administrative resource should not be the driving force.
Commenting the first SkolTech pilot class, Edward Crawley said that all of its students will be from Russia. “In the pilot class this year all twenty students will be from the Russian Federation. But the challenge is that they come from co-brands, which have very different traditions among them. What you learn after four years at “MGU”, and what you learn after four years at “PhysTech”, or what you learn after the ITMO at Novosibirsk – it’s actually very different. And we have to determine a way to take these students in a “level out”.
As the SkolTech’s president also said, this is not an unusual problem: universities have this situation around the world, but it’s still sort of a challenge in Russia. “In particular, the legacy of the Soviet system left these different institutions with very different preparations and different plans for preparation. So, on the one hand, the students are very good and very well educated. On the other hand, they are very different, lumpy,” Edward Crowley said.
Answering the question if this first pilot class will be formed mostly with the Skolkovo’s Open University (OpUS), Crawley said, that no specifically, “although many OpUS students said they were interested.”
And answering a question if any of companies-partners of the SkolTech have already named any specific issues they want to study there, Crawley said that it was too early to say as the Institute is just in its fourth months into this process, and the director of research had started just last week.
“But in general I can say about classes of issues: they are about application of cutting edge technology. We’ll have people, coming from all over the world to the SkolTech, to bring new technical and scientific knowledge with them, so this will be a source of new ideas,” he said. “We would probably have at SkolTech both research and education program in design of complex technical systems, which have important implication as the Russian industry moves beyond its traditional products, particularly state industry, while small and medium enterprise grow as well,” the SkolTech president said.
Edward Crawley thinks that the idea of manufacturing, meaning helping to reestablishing a competitive manufacturing sector in the Russian Federation, is of the prime importance.
“We graduate these wonderful students, who design these wonderful products, but where will they be built? I don’t want the only answer for this question to be – China. I want there to be a healthy manufacturing sector in the Russian Federation to reestablish this great tradition of building in Russia,” he stated.
Answering a question if SkolTech’s ties with the Skolkovo Foundation will help (in practical things, like bringing equipment into Russia) to build the new university and its laboratories, Edward Crawley said that the Foundation will certainly help attract multinational corporations.
“And at this point I’d have to get back to you on my understanding on how will it help attract Russian state owned enterprises. There are tax issues, which I completely understand, but even if there were no tax advantages: companies want to locate at least some of their facilities, some of their stuff in places, where there are emerging new ideas if they want to capture these ideas, when they are young and bring them into the company,” Crawley said. “Let me give you a very concrete example,” he continued. “In the United States one of the things, which happen quite often, is that professors found companies. And I founded four companies. So, I was looking for an office space around the MIT for one of them. And I couldn’t find it,” he said. “Why is that - because Microsoft is buying out every office around the university. And Microsoft is in Redmond, Washington, so why did it need an office around the MIT? It’s coming to MIT to catch the ideas, catch the students.”
Crawley also said that this process is increasing all over the world. “If you go by the main entrance of the Beijing University, what is the last sign you see there – “Google”. They come to these places to catch the ideas: that is what drives them, not taxes,” he said.
At the end of the interview Edward Crowley stated that the Educational programs and curriculum design workshop, he headed, was “the start of the design of the education”.
“It will take us probably about two years, and what we want to understand from these meetings is what people expect from the education, this is what we call “structured design” (of education).
“You start with understanding of the requirements of the education, understanding what students will flow into the education, what are the needs, which education will meet,” said the president of the SkolTech.