Research -Development - Application - Higher Education
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Higher education institutes are responsible are all three activities in the chain - Research - Development - Application.
The teaching in majority of the courses is aimed at application of knowledge acquired in the course by the learner during his career. In this focus areas, institutes have to find out new technologies and methods and make their students learn them. Then only the fresh batch of students can bring something new to the companies they join after their graduation. Existing employees of an organization are at a disadvantage whenever a new technology appears. They did not spend time on them. Fresh batches of recruits have a special talent with them to help the company if they learned new technologies in their course.
There is a lot of emphasis on fresh research output from higher academic institutes. There has to be much greater emphasis on monitoring of research by faculty members of the academic institutions. They need to study research journals and write articles and reviews that facilitate understanding the voluminous research output by practitioners. They need to identify research output that has potential to be developed into useful technology or procedure or method and bring that possibility to the notice of professionals, students and their colleagues. In certain disciplines say for instance, equity research, faculty members can try to develop the method. Development refers to the first practical demonstration of method or product using recent research output. Actually research output need not be recent, as there is a possibility that many old research ideas also may not have been converted into useful practical methods yet.
Application is use of developed methods and technologies in many places where they are technically useful and economical. There is creativity involved in commercial application of a developed technical product or process. While development is highly focused on technical issues and technical feasibility, application is oriented towards needs of user. User understanding, convenience, economics, aesthetics etc. come into focus during application. Hence more specialists may come into the process of commercializing a new development. Teachers in higher education institutes have to absorb first the various applications relevant in their field of study and then educate their students in them.
When higher education institutes maintain a good balance among the three components of Research - Development - Application, they will contribute more in each of the three components and provide lot more value to the society which is supporting them for their livelihood.
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