The objective of the roundtable was to bring together experts from industry, government and academia, to exchange ideas on how knowledge exchange can take place among these three entities. Sixteen attendees were present, representing large companies, SME’s, the IT research/consulting industry, LUMS academics/staff. As a visiting guest of the Centre, Professor Dr Kevin C. Desouza, ASU Foundation professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution participated. LUMS Entrepreneurs-in-Residences, Bill Lewis (Temsasys Communications) and Renwick Brutus (Udecon LLC) also participated.

The roundtable discussions focussed on collective sense-making around a series of statements that expressed commonly held beliefs about University-Industry-Government engagement. These included statements such as – ‘The role of the university is to provide expert knowledge rather than solve practical problems’, ‘Universities, Industry and the Government work to different goals – they cannot easily meet’, ‘Engagement with the wider community must become more firmly embedded in the mission of all universities’, and ‘Universities should focus on key societal and economic questions to have greater impact’. Participants debated these statements and provided examples and counter-examples from their experience. What emerged was not a consensus, but hopefully a better understanding of the importance and difficulty about such engagement, and the need for persevering with it against the odds. The outputs of the roundtable are planned to captured in a working paper, and would inform the engagement activities of the Centre as well as the larger discourse within Lancaster University on how knowledge that is created in universities can be fruitfully applied in industry and government.

Following the roundtable, there was a seminar by Professor Kevin DeSouza entitled ‘The Quandaries of a Public Intellectual working across Disciplinary Boundaries in Technology’, on the topic of the responsibility of academics to contribute to the public discourse and make the world a better place by conducting research that advances the greater public good.