Category Archives: Business and Law

Unpacking the Triple Helix: Universities, industry and government

This blog was contributed by Helen Lawton Smith, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Director, Centre for Innovation Management Research, Department of Management, Birkbeck.

Nearly 300 people — academics, policymakers and business practitioners — from 35 countries attended the beginning of the 2013 Triple Helix International Conference yesterday.

Why did they travel from across the globe to the three-day event hosted in Bloomsbury by the Big Innovation Centre, Birkbeck and UCL?

The first answer is that they came to be part of the debate on the conference theme: The triple helix in a context of global change: continuing, mutating or unravelling? The conference engages with the challenges for each of the three component spheres, of the triple helix model — universities, industry and government — as they co-innovate to solve global economic and social challenges. Discussions focused on different contexts and ways of building an ‘enterprising state.’

The second is that they came to network. This is the best bit of every conference. Who knows who you will sit next to on the river cruise, at the dinner at Lincoln’s Inn or in a parallel session or workshop?

The third answer is that they came to hear outstanding speakers. They came to listen to the originators of the Triple Helix metaphor, Henry Etzkowitz and Loet Leydesdorff, and David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science, and Will Hutton, the political economist and writer. They also wanted to hear from other distinguished keynote speakers from high-profile organisations, including the European Commission, the OECD, Unilever, EDF, GlaxoSmithKline, about the relevance of the triple helix model to their thinking and practice.

What three things will they have learned?

1.That the triple helix model is continuing to be central to the economic, social and technology policy agenda in many countries of the world, such as Brazil and Russia, and to international bodies, such as the European Commission’s Europe 2020 Smart Specialisation agenda. Alongside this is an increasing interest in how the impact of actions which follow from the agenda can be mapped, measured and evaluated in order to identify baselines for policy decisions.

2.That the model is not so much mutating but changing the forms it takes in the relationships between actors. Its inter-relationships are key to businesses, such as Unilever. In the cloud industry the basis of innovation in the market place is changing and requires a ‘convergence of capabilities’. Whether this counts as ‘open innovation’ is a debate that will continue long after this conference. An emphasis on the broader role of universities in the economy includes employability, an agenda which links all three of the spheres. This can take the form of entrepreneurship education, both formal through teaching programmes and through student and alumni support such as Birkbeck’s Enterprise Hub, and the mentoring programmes organised by Birkbeck’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Andrew Atter, based in the Centre for Innovation Management Research in the School of Business, Economics and Informatics. Professor David Latchman, Birkbeck’s Master, is himself an entrepreneur and believes that there should be more entrepreneurship.

Changing forms present challenges including the ever-present need for finance for entrepreneurs and innovation, and for universities to maintain their standards and diversify their activities to be more responsive to society’s needs.

3.The triple helix model is also a political agenda. It takes a variety of meanings depending on context for each of the three spheres in an uncertain world, nationally, regionally and locally. Whether the model will unravel will depend on how mismatches between the institutional arrangements in each of the three spheres are resolved. The coordination problems are considerable. Moreover, it is an issue of prioritisation. How the different stakeholder interests fit with the increasing pressures on universities to recruit students and enhance their learning experiences is a question yet to be answered.

Can Russia ever be understood?

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This post was contributed by Professor Bill Bowring from Birkbeck’s School of Law. Professor Bowring’s new book, published by Routledge, is entitled Law, Rights and Ideology in Russia: Landmarks in the Destiny of a Great Power.

Not another history of Russia

My new book, published on 5 April 2013, is not a narrative of Russian history; there are several already. I am a lawyer, but the new book is not a legal textbook. Instead, I dig deep into some key episodes from the 18^th century, when law as an academic discipline began in Russia, to the present day, with the ideology of the Putin regime, and its impact on the Russia’s relations with the European Court of Human Rights. My interests cross the borders between law, history, politics and philosophy, and I draw from many Russian language sources.

And I am the proud possessor of a Reading Room Card issued in 2011 by the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Science of the Academy of Science of the USSR (the INION Library) to Comrade Bowring B. They are still using the old cards.

Russia from the inside – and from the outside too

The Russia authorities have tried to exclude me from Russia a couple of times – I was thrown out in 2005 and 2007 – but have returned many times. From my first visit in 1983 Russia has got under my skin. This year I have already been to Russia three times, most recently to Ioshkar-Ola, the capital of the Republic of Mari El. You have not heard of either! The Mari people speak a language related to Finnish, and their religion is Shamanism – they worship in the forests.

Russia’s mission to save the world

Russian identity contains unique ideological ingredients. First is messianism, the idea that Russia has a sacred task, of saving the world. When Constantinople fell in 1453, Moscow was promoted as the “Third Rome”. In the USSR Moscow became a “Fourth Rome”. The ideology of the Putin regime contains elements of Eurasianism, intended to unite the four traditional religions of Russia – Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism – in opposition to Western materialism and consumerism. The related concepts of “sovereignty” and “sovereign democracy” have their roots in the thought of the German conservative Catholic – for a time Nazi – thinker Carl Schmitt. Russian intellectuals have been divided between Slavophiles, the inheritors of messianism, and Westernisers, who believe that Russia must emulate the success of Western Europe.

The academic discipline of law in Russia began in Scotland

I focus first on the first Russian professor of law to teach in Russian, Semyon Desnitsky, in the time of Catherine the Great. He was sent to study at the University of Glasgow from 1760 to 1767, at the time of the Scottish Enlightenment, attended lectures by Adam Smith, successfully defended his Doctorate on civil law, and was Professor of Law at Moscow University from 1767 to 1787. He greatly influenced Catherine the Great and translated William Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Laws of England” into Russian.

Trial by jury in Tsarist Russia

Russia lost the Crimean war, a great shock after victory against Napoleon in 1814. Reform was essential. Not only did Tsar Aleksandr II abolish serfdom in 1861, his Great Reforms of 1864 included the introduction of trial by jury, based on English models, which continued until 1917, and has now been re-introduced in every part of the Russian Federation. Contemporary accounts bring out the dramatic significance of jury trials, independent judges – and Justices of the Peace.

How the USSR collapsed – and how Russia bought into European human rights

In my other chapters I explore the thought and tragic life of the most original Soviet theorist of law, Yevgeniy Pashukanis. I trace the paradoxes of Soviet international law, and show how traditions of regional autonomy in Tsarist and Soviet Russia helped to bring about the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Why did Russia, after the Soviet insistence on non-interference in internal affairs, join the Council of Europe in 1996 and ratify the ECHR in 1998; and why did the Council allow Russia to join, when the First Chechen War was still raging?

My reader will not have answers to every question; rather, a degree of understanding.

In 2008, Professor Bowring published The Degradation of the International Legal Order? The Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility of Politics – also with Routledge. This will shortly appear in Russian translation, with the publisher Novoye Literaturnoye Obozreniye (New Literary Review).

Food insecurity in Palestine

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Dr Elisa Cavatorta completed her PhD in Birkbeck’s Department of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics in 2011.

While the Millenium Development Goals have focused on eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and many efforts have been put in place, food insecurity remains a serious concern in many parts of the world.

The Rome Declaration on World Food Security (1996) and the World Food Summit Plan of Action define food insecurity as the situation when people do not have adequate physical, social or economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.

Previous studies have tended to consider the factors which affect food insecurity either at household-level (such as income, family structure and sectorial employment); or at district or country level (such as soil fertility depletion, agricultural sustainability and access to markets). While there is a consensus that these factors can be interlinked, they are rarely assessed in combination. One of the main challenges to address environmental factors and accessibility to resources, together with socio-economic characteristics is the integration of the two into a common spatial unit.

Dr Cavatorta and Sam Waples, of Birkbeck’s Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies, engaged in a interdisciplinary research effort to look at the spatial distribution of food insecurity prevalence among communities in the West Bank region of the Palestinian Territories – an area not only characterised by diverse topography, vegetation, climate and land-use; but one where development and mobility are considerably hindered by the political division of land.

Differently from the existing literature, their study explores the association between household level food insecurity and physical characteristics such as soil fertility and access to resources. A range of data sources are integrated including household level survey data on food insecurity, community level census data as well as environmental factors and resource accessibility data modelled to communities and their surrounds.

The study is part of a larger research project including a similar investigation for the Arab Republic of Syria, which, due to the current events, has been suspended. The case of Syria, a large agricultural producer, would shed light on the role of agriculture in addressing food security.

Dr Cavatorta and Sam Waples use a mix of quantitative techniques, fieldwork visits and elaborate Geographic Information System (GIS) information to create an original and comprehensive dataset on 489 communities in the West Bank.

The analysis allowed the estimation of food insecurity incidence at community level throughout the entire West Bank. The results of these estimations were mapped and they highlight distinct spatial patterns, with clusters of severe food insecure communities found in the North West near the border of Israel as well as the centre of West Bank between the towns of Salfit and Bethlehem. The highest levels of food insecurity were found in Area A, the part of the West Bank which falls under Israeli civilian and military jurisdiction.

Dr Cavatorta and Mr Waples elaborated upon existing GIS layers of community and region locations, road networks and mobility restrictions to compute measures of market access, the number of mobility restrictions and measures of access to services. This is a specific consideration to be taken into account in the case of the West Bank, where mobility restrictions have a serious impact on food insecurity levels.

Taking the analysis one step further the results allowed preliminary policy simulations and their impact on food insecurity to be conducted. Amongst the considered policies they simulate improvements in living conditions (increasing wealth or decreasing unemployment), the lifting of mobility restrictions and finally the development of infrastructure. The results indicate that potential policies not only impact upon incidence of food insecurity with varying levels of effectiveness but also the response to policy varies geographically too.

In summary the combination of food insecurity, socio-economic and physical data at the household and community level has created a powerful dataset which has allowed both the prediction of food insecurity in communities not surveyed and how environmental factors explain food insecurity incidence. The results were used to investigate a number of scenarios which highlighted the need for both political stability and effective locally targeted intervention.

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