Commercial activity in new university business schools: trends and predictions for the future

• Date: 01 January 2004
• Published date: 01 January 2004
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jsc.661
• Author: Christopher Prince,Graham Beaver

Commercial activity in new university

business schools: trends and

predictions for the future

Christopher Prince and Graham Beaver*

Nottingham Business School, UK

Commercial activity, or third leg activity as the Higher Education Funding Council for

England (HEFCE) defines it, and the income it generates, is of increasing importance to

all higher education institutions (DES, 2003; CEML, 2002).

For new or modern university business schools in particular, the falling unit of resource

attaching to HEFCE student teaching income and the virtual disappearance of research

revenues as a result of the poor results in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE),

has combined to produce a scenario in which commercial activity is likely to be an

increasing priority as business schools attempt to remain effective and solvent.

Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Strategic Change, Jan–Feb 2004

of new university business schools. A close

examination of commercialization considered

in the HEFCE Report focuses primarily on sci-

ences and technology using such measures as

contract research, intellectual property (such

as patents and licensing) and spin-off firms.

Although there are measures of programmes

and consultancy linked to business in the

survey, these are not disaggregated sufficiently

to identify business school performance.

The research conducted for this paper

focuses on the commercial activity of new uni-

versity business schools and includes business

and management schools in university colleges

and colleges of higher education. There are a

number of reasons for this inclusion. First, as

Prince (2000) and Prince and Stewart (2000)

point out, new and old universities primarily

operate in different sectors of the commer-

cial education market. Established universities

(pre-1992) tend to operate exclusively in the

executive education and MBA marketplace.

New universities, on the other hand, tend to

Strat. Change 13: 19–28 (2004)

Published online in Wiley InterScience

(www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jsc.661 Strategic Change

*Cor respondence to: Graham Beaver, Nottingham

Business School, The Nottingham Trent University,

Nottingham NG1 4BU, UK.

E-mail: graham.beaver@lineone.net

Introduction

While there has been considerable research

into management development in general,

for example, Thomson et al. (1997, 2001),

specific research into in-company manage-

ment education by Prince (2000, 2002),

Prince and Stewart (2000) and Brown (1999)

and into executive education (Crainer, 1997),

there has been very little research into the

structuring and operation of commercial acti-

vity within new university business schools.

Indeed, what research there has been into uni-

versity commercial activity, for example the

Higher Education Business Interaction Survey

(HEFCE, 2003), examined all UK universities

at a level of aggregation that makes it impos-

sible to determine levels of business school

commercialization, let alone the performance