Speaker
Description
Whilst higher educational institutions are trying their best in complying with corporate governance best practices and recommendations, there is still an outstanding challenge on how to govern disruptive technologies. Most higher learning institutions in Africa depend on government aided grants for their day to day operations. Research grants channeled towards projects in universities is low and most of these projects are discarded without even considering their viability to the institutions and the global community. Disruptive technologies can be adopted by universities to support innovation creativity, quickly enter targeted markets dominated by big industries and gain market share. There is a constantly rising use of technology in society and different university technologies are designed that think and process information better. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) must be able to support upcoming disruptive technology by applying appropriate filters on forces of change so that the disruptive nature of the upcoming innovation is tamed into the organization’s practices, concepts and structures. However, the underlying problem is which disruptive innovations are tamable and could be used as a source of new practices and concepts so that organizational structures can be improved through research at HEIs. A lot on upcoming disruptive technology is not quickly harnessed by institutions of higher learning and some of the technology becomes obsolete. HEIs must support maximum experimental learning and development, as well as research in technology innovation, adoption and implementation. Disruptive technology must be easily controlled by higher learning institutions and turned into profit for development of these institutions. Also, since universities support research as one of their key roles, they are a good platform for exploring disruptive technologies and tame them as they come up. In this paper, university students (and other stakeholders) were used as a virtual market for upcoming disruptive technologies and the proportional performance of the disruptive technologies identified is then evaluated against the subsistence or conventional technologies. Then a framework is provided for scanning and identifying upcoming disruptive technologies, explore their possible environment of conventional use and absorb the upcoming disruptive technologies in formal settings well ahead of the business community at low costs with a targeted increase in ICT service delivery. The result of this paper offer universities a tool that facilitates a positive approach (improved decision making), helping develop and identify new disruptive technology and properly tame (patent) them to their advantage.
Key Words: Disruptive Technology, Innovation, HEIs, university, research, market position
Summary
Disruptive Technology in HEIs need to be monitored from the onset of the idea to the final product, as this will help decision makers to identify probable future technologies that will benefit the institutions. This paper presents a framework that can be used by HEIs for scanning and identifying upcoming disruptive technologies as well as taming them to their advantage.
| Sub-Theme | SMART Governance: Services and tools |
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