Indonesian University Should Trigger Innovation

For the past several months, I've met with academics from universities all over the island. The chat I had was insightful and somewhat clarifying a theory I have had bouncing in my mind since last year about how universities have a big role in shaping Silicon Valley to become how it is today and of course how it's related to Indonesian universities.

Silicon Valley's history cannot be separated from universities surrounding the area, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, etc. If you look at these universities, they aren't just contributing through education and human resources, but rather to the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation, the very soul of Silicon Valley.

These universities give lots of culture seed of the early Silicon Valley, I think what they did significantly was transferring technology created in campus labs to companies/industry. The skill and knowledge were transfered primarily through existing firms that took licenses, or through companies founded by students, staff and faculty. Other alternative was primary contribution through education of engineering and business students to continuously replenish intellectual pool.

From here, you can see these fairly essential factor on what university can give in order to grow "Silicon Valley" :

• Producing talents and hard-skill for engineering (product, business, marketing, etc)
• Do market research and analysis as a part of study in research labs
• Provide reward on innovation and entrepreneurship
• Creating the perfect environment to grow, incubate students and give easy access to basic technology
• Give access to a later-stage incubator, investors or direct access to the industry

In Indonesia, now is the moment for universities to step up and do more contribution to the industry in order to fill in the huge gap between curriculum standard and the industry requirements. For now, I think lots of universities only focus on delivering the curriculum and produce graduates every year which is fine until they find that significant percentage of their alumni having a hard time finding jobs.

Why? Because they're educated to work hard to find jobs. Not create jobs.

If universities in Indonesia can switch this mindset on the life after college, that would give more value for students and the industry as a whole. And now, some university already trying this approach giving training, public lecture from influential people in the industry and role-model entrepreneurs to give them the spirit of entrepreneurial.

In Indonesia, there's several things Indonesian universities can do (in my humble opinion) especially in the tech industry :

• Give training on the latest web technology (programming language, frameworks, servers, OSs, platforms, etc)
• Invite successful entrepreneurs (preferably alums) to give entrepreneurial background to students and business/management education
• Switch mindset from curriculum-based university, to research-based university
• Compensate and give rewards for innovation, maybe by incubating student business/companies
• Work closely and directly with people in the industry (tech companies, investors, startups, etc)

If Indonesian universities can do this, it's one step closer to an innovative and dynamic tech industry in Indonesia. And maybe, Indonesia can be the next Silicon Valley. That's my opinion, but I would love to hear more additional comment from you guys.