Strategy

In business, an entrepreneur may choose to produce a variety of low quality products and sell them cheap. While the profit margin of each product is low, the overall high volume of sales may still bring reasonably good profit to the business. 

However, producing many products may require more efforts from the business such as higher production costs with many different raw materials and sets of skilled workers and production lines plus many other indirect costs and expenses. 

On the other hand, an entrepreneur may choose to focus and produce only a selected high quality and high value products which with the right branding and marketing strategy can be sold at a premium price and bring high profit.

While the RnD costs to produce such a product maybe higher at the beginning compared to the former, the ROI is also higher. The branding of such products will become a key and sustainable advantage to the business for many years to come.

I believe the same concept applies in higher education. Over the last ten years I have studied various models of business schools from a very comprehensive at one extreme to a very focused and specialised schools such as IMD at the other end.

Some b-schools offer various UG and PG programmes while others concentrate and create branding on selected PG programmes such as MBA, EMBA and Executive Education and market them at a premium fee where the profit margin is higher. 

The same goes to research. While some universities go for the number of research and publications others focus on a more strategic and targeted research with impacts not only to the academic community but also other stakeholders.

Like in business, going for the mass market may bring the numbers, either students, research or publication. However, targeting niche and strategic research areas, like luxury products, may help build a good brand/image and higher profits. 

It is like a choice of either publishing 1000 papers in low ranked journals or 100 papers in high ranked journals. Publishing in reputable journals though takes longer time and effort has bigger potentials for higher citations and build better academic reputation. 

Ideally research outputs should not end in academic journals but go around a wider value chains. For example, a different version of writings can be published in professional magazines in a format understood by practitioners. 

New research findings may also be shared with students in the classrooms and practitioners in the executive trainings. The new knowledge may also open up further opportunities to researchers via consultation works. 

The experiences gained by researchers from these activities will create more opportunities and benefits not only to the researchers but students and other stakeholders. It is a continuous process of learning, unlearning and relearning.

For S&T research, some of the products may be patented and commercialised. However, similar to industry RnD projects, not all research outputs will have a direct benefit. Some require further research and may take years before realising their potentials. 

It is all about strategy. A simple quick wins strategy or a little bit more complicated but sustainable ones. The choice is ours. Just a thought on a blessed Friday morning so comments are most welcome. Wallhuaklam.