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459 UPBEAT: University Engagement through Virtuous Knowledge Sharing and Academic Staff Development James A. Powell Over the past decade, the University of Salford has responded in a unique way to the national and global challenges it has faced. This reflects the particular academic strength of the staff and the situation in which it found itself in the middle to late 1990s. This strategy, developed in the light of a changing environment, focuses in particular on its development of Academic Enterprise (Æ) as a means of promoting better work not only with industry and commerce, but also with other stakeholders, such as those in civil and voluntary organizations, in the community at large, and not least, within the university itself. This chapter condenses findings relating to the development and formative evaluation of more than two hundred case studies of how universities have successfully built mutually beneficial relationships with their local businesses and communities, giving them the confidence to develop, for themselves, successful social and community enterprises . The result is the UPBEAT matrix, a model for transforming traditional academics into enterprising ones. The UPBEAT approach recognizes four underlying skills that are needed to fertilize a novel academic idea, enabling it to bloom in the knowledge economy: business acumen and individual performance are two key skills essential in making any social enterprise work effectively and efficiently; social networking intelligence and foresight enabling skills are also critical to success in today’s complex knowledge economy. This chapter demonstrates how the UPBEAT project management matrix helps academics develop and continuously to improve these four skills in parallel. The chapter also briefly illustrates how the tool has been used to achieve success in three quite different social enterprises: Contraception: The Board Game, Community Banks, and Bouncing Higher, a balanced learning approach that helps small businesses become more innovative for wealth creation. J A M E S A . P O W E L L 460 Development of Academic Enterprise (Æ) These are exciting times in higher education as universities work more closely with business and the community to harness the undoubted imagination and reason of formidable academics and combine it with the drive and daring of local entrepreneurs. Local universities in the United Kingdom have always reached out to develop best academic-enterprise practice . In the knowledge economy, academic-enterprise practices may well be the key to future wealth creation and improvement in the quality of all our lives. Salford University recognized the need to undertake this practice and began to prepare itself to virtuously share knowledge with all its partners. This unique form of enterprise developed at Salford University is known as Academic Enterprise (Powell, 2001; Powell, Harloe, & Goldsmith, 2000), and focuses particularly on the development of socially inclusive wealth creation. Academic Enterprise is also an approach to staff development focusing on enabling staff to become more enterprising and thereby to have a greater opportunity to induce cultural change. In 1998, Burton Clark identified key characteristics that defined the entrepreneurial universities of the day. He focused on those universities that grew, not just in their research and teaching income, but also in working relationships with business and industry. Such universities were characterized by a conscious effort to innovate in how they went about their business and how they positioned themselves to make substantial shifts in organizational character in order to arrive at a more promising position for the future. In order to bring about the necessary change processes required to embed Æ in the university , it was first necessary to develop an internal vision that could be shared by everybody in the institution. A small Æ core team felt that the real basis for achieving success in the new activity was a strong linkage between the words “academic” and “enterprise” and their joint actions, creating a new phrase (Æ) and activity and suggesting an inseparable interface to guide this new stream of university work. The team wanted academic colleagues to undertake bold new academic pursuits reflecting their clear academic values, knowledge, and capabilities. The hallmark of Salford University’s Æ approach lay in opening up the formidable skills and imagination of its own staff, developed through rigorous evaluation and sound research, undertaken on the basis of the highest academic values, for reasoned specifications for actions in the real world. Academic Enterprise is also about having the daring to work in creative enterprise partnerships to stage-manage novel yet robust ideas, innovations, approaches, and technologies into actual improvements for all partners, and beyond. The deep partnerships formed with local entrepreneurs became the key...

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