Mission Economy and the University

Many professions take pride in stating “This is not a profession, it is a calling” and the profession of an academic is not an exception. This is largely due to a self-motivating nature of calling, where one works with a sense of purpose or a sense of a mission. The sense of purpose at the academia comes, in most of the cases, from the mission to discover, create new knowledge, and share it with the society.

On the other hand, the global society is faced with a number of large-scale problems, such as energy supply, climate change, sustainable use of resources, and similar, as conveniently framed by the set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals. If the universities are to play a substantial role in addressing and solving these challenges, then a way to do it is to bundle these goals with the academic curiosity and the capability to disentangle and solve difficult problems. Specifically, this may be done by defining suitable missions that will renew (upgrade or replace) the sense of purpose in academic research, while at the same time ensuring a coherent, multidisciplinary work towards solving the grand problems of the society.

The right place to draw inspiration in this direction seems to be the notion of mission as defined by Mariana Mazzucato in her book “Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism”. A second look at the book title brings a dose of skepticism, as besides the term mission, it contains the terms economy and capitalism; both terms are related to the role of the university in the society, but it is hard to find an immediate causal relation between the definition of a mission at a university and the disruption of capitalisam. Further on, Mazzucato’s effort to redefine capitalism draws an inspiration from the Apollo mission to the Moon, one of the biggest and most successful endeavors in human history.

University: A Simplified Model

Let us look into a simplified model of how university works in order to be able to relate it to the concept of a mission. This simplified model is shown on Figure 1 and elaborated further here:

• Education: Create and run educations that are relevant, capable to attract students and to produce high-quality candidates that can contribute to various segments of the society and industry.
• Research: Define and solve research problems, fundamental or in collaboration with the industry or public institutions, while raising money for research funding.
• Innovation: Create intellectual property that can be licensed, sold, or used to spin off companies. In addition, carry out consultancy activities for the industry and the society. This was succinctly put at a recent meeting with the director of the innovation/enterprise activities at one of the absolute top world universities: "Consultancy is perfectly viable way by which the researchers can share knowledge with the society, while getting extra salary to top up their academic earnings".
• Share knowledge to the society: In addition to the consultancy above, this involves more conventional way sof sharing through publications, project results, public talks, online videos, etc.

Figure 1. A simplified model of how is the total capacity utilized for an academic, person or institution.

Using this simplified model, we can represent two extreme ways in which the missions can be positioned with respect to the total capacity for activities at a university. This is depicted on Figure 2. In the worst case, part of the total capacity goes to the overhead for running missions, taking away resources from the other core activities at the university. In the best case, the missions pervade and positively impact all the core activities at the university.

In the process of defining the missions, the start is at the worst case, as there is a need of a "startup overhead" to get the missions defined and going. Ideally, the implementation of the missions should converge over time to the best case. Thus the implementation is critical, as it will affect how close is the convergence to the best case. For example, a large overhead of the missions may take a substantial cut from the research capacity, resulting to lower research performance and thus lower chances to get top research grants. We will come back to the implementation issues after describing the basic premises in Mazzucato's book.

Figure 2. The worst and the best positioning of the missions with respect to th

The Premises towards Mission Economy

There are two key premises that Mazzucato uses as a motivation to define the need for a mission economy:

• The companies that operate and harvest profit within the current framework of capitalism are primarily responsible towards the shareholders and, secondary, towards the society. As an example, a company would work to meet the financial expectation of a shareholder, even if that may aggravate some of the large societal problems.
• Companies that are subsidized by public funds do share the risk with the society, but do not share the revenues/wealth with the society in a way that is proportional to their longer-term success. The examples provided in the book are related to the public subsidizing of the electric cars or space technology.

The book argues that these two and the related phenomena require redefinition of the capitalism, as stated in this excerpt:

“We can only begin to find answers if we fundamentally restructure capitalism to make it inclusive, sustainable, and driven by innovation that tackles concrete problems. That means changing government tools and culture, creating new markers of corporate governance, and ensuring that corporations, society, and the government coalesce to share a common goal.”

As mentioned above, the work on mission economy draws a strong inspiration from the Apollo mission to the Moon. On September 12, 1962, John F. Kennedy delivered the “We choose to go to the Moon” speech, in which he announced the plan to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. This mission was initiated by the sense of urgency created by the successes of the Soviet space program, most notably the launching of Sputnik 1 and having Gagarin as the first man in space in 1961. The mission was completed by Moon landing in July 1969, less than 7 years after the speech. Note that, in 2022, some countries are struggling to build a <100 km highway within the same period. The book "Mission Economy" derives 6 lessons from the Apollo mission:

1. Vision and a strong sense of purpose;
2. Risk taking and innovation;
3. Cross-sectoral collaboration;
4. Outcomes-based budgets and long-term horizons;
5. Organisational dynamism;
6. Dynamic public-private partnerships.

While all of them seem self-explanatory, it is interesting and educational to go through their elaboration in the book. Here I would only add that these 6 lessons needs to be considered in their entirety. For example, omitting the last two, "Organizational dynamism" and "Dynamic public-private partnerships" could easily lead to a successful mission that is similar to Sputnik 1. In fact, these two last points are the ones that lead to empowerment of the involved people as well as system of incentives that keeps the overall running of the mission; clearly, within the Soviet system there was no place for personal incentives.

Incentives and finance in accomplishing a large-scale mission play the central role in another recent book, "The Ministry for the Future", a climate fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson. This book looks in the near future, in which global warming takes its toll around the world, causing massive starvation and death. Without spoiling the plot, here it is important to note that the long-term solution to the global warming problem and its consequences is found by aligning the financial system and incentives, up to the central banks, with the climate objectives. Check carbon coin for further reading.

Implementing Missions at the University

Based on the discussion above, the implementation of missions at a university, inspired by the "Mission Economy", requires careful consideration of all Apollo lessons. Balancing all the lessons may be decisive for implementing successful missions at the university and arriving to the best case of Figure 2. Some fine implementation details could lead to unwanted outcomes. Indeed, one can differentiate between three different outcomes of the mission implementation from the viewpoint of an an academic:

1. The missions are implemented in a way where all of the following are aligned: the sense of purpose given by the mission, the working conditions and culture at academia, the curiosity-driven research, and the unimpeded teaching/research performance.
2. Still work on a mission, but move to an industry/public institution where the conditions and incentives are better aligned.
3. Move to an academic environment that still preserves the traditional university objectives, e.g. excellence in education and research.

While 2. can never be excluded, 3. is becoming less of a viable option. In a recent discussion with some of the top UK universities, I could witness that the global societal problem are driving the university agenda through centers and grand-challenge-initiatives (which, unlike "mission", are open-ended). In other words, universities will not stay detached from the large societal problems and one has to carefully consider what is the best mode to address those problems within the university activities.

What, then, is the best way to map the ideas from "Mission Economy" to a university? Here are some ideas lated to the last two points of the Apollo lessons:

• Establish a new types of contracts with the private sector. This could involve new ways to share the revenue between the university and the private companies, during or after they are involved in a collaborative project. For instance this could be done through licensing clauses, ways in which university can appear as equity holder, etc. Another idea in this direction can be fluid/flexible employment contract between industry and academia.
• Establish an incentive structure at the university based on the mission success. This could include bonuses, equities or some of the new forms for storing value, such as digital tokens.

Regarding the possible missions, here are some examples that are heavily biased to my own research areas and interests.

• Carbon coin. Clearly, inspired by “The Ministry for the Future”, discussed above.
• Negative-emission wireless mobile network. A wireless mobile network is a major energy consumer and this is only going to increase as the network elements get deployed more densely and support wireless "Internet of Everything". There is a need gfor sustainable energy supply of these networks. The "negative" part can come from the fact that many of these connections will be used to improve processes and save energy in the physical world.
• Brain-level computational efficiency. Machine learning algorithms are becoming capable to solve problems of increasing complexity and, while doing that, spend large amounts of energy for computation. But a human can solve extremely complex problems while using the energy of a single banana during the day. Attaining such computational efficiency requires a concerted effort of multiple disciplines.
• Data at a right privacy or right price. There are two dominant paradigms for treating data privacy in today's internet. One extreme is to offer a free online service, such as email or social media, but then "the user is the product" and user's data is freely available to the provider. The second extreme is data that stays fully private. Within the broad spectrum between these two extremes there is a lot of potential to develop schemes for data pricing that can trade off privacy for economic incentives. Clearly, a highly interdisciplinary effort.

As a final note, while Mazzucato's proposal offers an inspiration and framework for thinking towards defining the shape of mission-oriented university, there is a need for finding new and creative ways how academics can respond effectively to the large-scale problems the society is facing.