Hong Kong universities¡¯ efforts to tackle social problems are hamstrung by unsupportive funding arrangements, go-it-alone attitudes and a focus on theory rather than application, a report says.

A stocktake of Hong Kong universities¡¯ ¡°social innovation¡± activities ¨C research, teaching and community engagement focused on problems such as poverty, ageing and isolation ¨C has found that they are fragmented, ad?hoc and undervalued.

A literature review was able to identify only about 50 home-grown academic publications about social innovation, half of them lead-authored by just six local experts. Almost three-quarters of research projects involved no external collaborators, often replicating work happening elsewhere in the territory.

The , published by the British Council, found that Hong Kong¡¯s 60-odd social innovation courses were mostly elective subjects concentrated in four institutions. A smattering of knowledge exchange and community engagement activities largely involved academics holding board or committee roles ¡°rather than active research-led engagement¡±.

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The research pinpointed ¡°key social problems¡± including housing ¨C widely cited as an underlying cause of the youth disaffection fuelling the current protests ¨C as well as social inequality and ageing. But lacking the coordinated focus of university collaborations elsewhere ¨C such as Australia¡¯s Centre for Social Impact, the University of Oxford¡¯s Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and Stanford University¡¯s Center for Social Innovation ¨C Hong Kong higher education was not well positioned to address these problems, the report says.

It adds that ¡°positive trends¡± in universities¡¯ social innovation efforts are being undermined by policy settings.

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¡°There are systemic barriers in HK to collaboration in this field, such as the way research funding is administered and the competition between higher education institutions,¡± Jeff Streeter, the British Council¡¯s Hong Kong director, says in the report¡¯s foreword. ¡°While there is significant work going on and strong interest from researchers and students alike, much more needs to be done.¡±

The report says that with funders of social innovation research wanting the results published in high-ranking journals, much of the research is inevitably theoretical in nature.

Collaboration is stymied by a dearth of social innovation champions in universities and by a lack of ¡°top-down¡± support for impact research, the report adds, although a 15?per cent impact weighting assigned to next year¡¯s research assessment exercise ¨C coupled with Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam¡¯s commitment to double research and development spending ¨C could help.

The report offers eight recommendations to boost social innovation in the territory¡¯s universities, such as making impact a criterion for academic tenure and developing new funding streams for ¡°multidisciplinary, pan-institutional, applied research¡±.

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Report co-author Yanto Chandra said that social innovation, as a ¡°relatively new field¡± globally ¨C and even younger in Hong Kong, where the first course started in 2012 ¨C offered scant opportunities for career advancement.

With only a handful of dedicated journals, none of them considered mainstream, social innovation academics needed to publish in other fields to earn tenure and promotion.

Dr Chandra, a social entrepreneurship specialist at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, stressed that the project had not investigated the current protests or their underlying causes. But he said higher education had a ¡°central¡± role in generating solutions to problems such as the affordability of housing.

¡°Governments are always under observation by the public,¡± he said. ¡°It ties their hands if they want to do something innovative. University is where new ideas about solving social problems are created and disseminated.¡±

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com