Outsourcing university research as development aid?

Newsweek-International Edition this week (Aug. 21-28, 2006) has several reports about higher education. The main piece is about newly published rankings of universities throughout the world. Among the factors used to determine the rankings are number of international faculty and students. Several follow-up articles discuss internationalisation from various points of view. One of the articles is written by Tony Blair and is a reiteration of what is increasingly being heard throughout Europe, asking how universities can maintain their autonomy and increase the revenues. As I’m sure most people know, most European universities are bound by law to offer free or nearly free education. Allowing them to charge tuition requires changing the laws and this is a difficult task since there are still many people with the support of fairly strong political parties that oppose university tuitions. The question then is how can universities increase their revenue without charging tuition? As I read the articles, some of which argue for a more business-like approach to the operation of universities, I started thinking about universities as businesses. That led to me thinking about the outsourcing boom in global business today. Not just the obvious much talked about outsourcing like call centres in India, etc., but more about the intricate relationship building that Friedman talks about in The World is Flat. Friedman describes how a single project may be outsourced and re-outsourced so that in the end the product is produced in components all over the world using expertise being developed within specific regions. It finally dawned on me that with modern ICTs the same thing can be done with a lot of the scientific research that goes on within universities and research centres. Basically, pass the data around and have the analysis done where the expertise is greatest. Obviously, this does already happen to some extent, but I’m talking about boiling it down to simple business – send us your data and tell us what you want done with it and we’ll send you the results. As I thought more about this I started asking myself whether this might even be formulated as viable knowledge-building development aid – outsource data processing to universities in developing countries. Think of it as an affordable way to involve universities in developing countries in research being carried out at top universities while building relationships with other universities world-wide.
Being prone to bouts of severe realism, I thought, this can’t be such a bright idea that no one thought about it before! So off I went on the Internet in search of similar ideas and lo and behold – UK to outsource research to India. This could offer some very interesting possibilities…