Edu-business within the Triple Helix. Value production through assetization of educational research

ABSTRACT

Growing demands on evidence-based teaching, combined with increasing business involve-ment, constitute a transformation of education in which research and research collaborations have become commodities and selling points for companies. This article, building on interviews with 30 Swedish edupreneurs, explores how the discursive trope of the Triple Helix organises collaborations between the business sector, research, and school. In what ways do people in edu-business use research and research collaborations and what kinds of values do they expect to produce through different practices? The study identifies five approaches to research – philanthropists, influencers, ambassadors, brokers, and engineers – and describe the edupreneurs’ manifold ways of using, relating to, and translating research into sellable products. Using the theoretical lens of assetization, we show how different values are produced: (1) economic – strengthening the company’s brand; (2) pedagogical – changing teaching practices; (3) political – lobbying for policy change and changing public conversations; (4) academic – defining useful research and funding research, and (5) social – building networks. We conclude that the striving for Triple Helix collaborations preserves the entrepreneurial right to define useful research and providing legitimacy through the power of research, an important asset on the edu-market.

KEYWORDS:

• Edu-business
• Triple Helix
• research use
• power of research
• commercialisation
• assetization

Introduction

Over the last decade, Swedish schools have experienced growing demands on evidence-based teaching, as well as an increasing involvement of commercial companies delivering digital platforms, consulting services, and models for school development, among other things. In this double-sided transformation of compulsory education, educational research has become a commodity and a selling point for commercial companies (e.g. Enright, Hogan, & Rossi, 2020; Ideland, Jobér, & Axelsson, 2021). The present article analyzes this intersection among the business sector, research, and school. We argue that educational research has become an asset that is expected to produce both economic and non-economic values, for business and for schools.

While compulsory school is increasingly entangled with the demands of research-based education and commercial interests, there have been rising expectations for universities to “actively contribute to addressing broader socio-economic challenges” (Chantler, 2016, p. 215). Although social engagement is not a novel idea for the universities, this development has evoked a change from being seen as quite independent institutions to being regarded as important engines for the national economy and labour market (Gibbons et al., 1994). In addition, and as part of a broader shift to a knowledge-based economy, the idea of entrepreneurial universities has grown stronger (Etzkowitz et al., 2008), and various frameworks have been articulated to understand the new relations among universities, business companies, and the public sector. One is the Triple Helix, which was developed in the 1990s as a model for understanding the interconnections and interdependencies among science, industry, and government and how collaboration can promote innovation (Leydesdorff & Etzkowitz, 1996). Unsurprisingly, the shift described above has been met with harsh critiques and conversations about the profound risks that science answers to customers’ needs, rather than scientific questions (Brown, 2000; Chantler, 2016).

Beyond actual practices, the idea of close interplay among the university, the business sector, and society functions as a powerful discourse that is entangled in and interferes with the conditions of scientific practice (Rip, 2000; Shinn, 2002). Also, policy has been reformed; new relationships and power networks have unfolded (Ball, 2012); the governance and structure have changed (Etzkowitz et al., 2008); and researchers have acquired habits and values regarding the purposes and practices of their work (Bok, 1982; Rip, 2000). This discourse is productive in that it organises how we can think and act. In many areas, collaborations have become a natural way to work in the borderlands between scientific fields and their corresponding public and commercial sectors, such as the medical science/healthcare/pharmaceutical industry and the computer science/IT sector. In the present study, we focus on a less developed area for collaborations: the edu-business sector, selling research-based products and services to schools.

Departing from an interview study, this article explores how what we conceptualise as the discursive trope of the Triple Helix operates within the edu-business sector, producing practices as well as values. The aim is to unpack in which different ways the sector makes use of research and research collaborations. We will argue that research is considered as an asset that is expected to produce present and future values in economic, social, pedagogical, and political aspects (Langley, 2020; Muniesa et al., 2017). The goal of the analysis is to increase the understanding of how expectations of business/university/school-collaborations produce business activities, but also cultural understandings of what is valued as “useful” research and “effective teaching”.

The remainder of this article is structured as follows. Following this introduction to the expectations of interplays between academia/industry/society, we describe the policy conditions for Triple Helix collaborations related to Swedish education and edu-business. We then account for the theoretical and methodological departure points, before analysing different ideal types for using research and research collaborations in edu-business. We conclude by pointing out the multiple ways of imagining and practicing educational Triple Helixes and discuss what it means to say that research is entering school through commercial companies.

An educational Triple Helix within the Swedish context

This section elaborates on how the idea of a close interplay between universities, public and business sectors has become the kind of strong, discourse that we suggested in the introduction to this article. We embed this idea within a Swedish context, where privatisation and marketisation have become important cornerstones, both in education politics and in the compulsory school system (Dahlstedt & Fejes, 2019; Rönnberg, 2017).

Sweden, along with some of the grant universities in the United States, was a pioneer in developing notions of engagement and entrepreneurialism in universities (Etzkowitz et al., 2008). An example is the early implementation of so-called holding companies at Swedish universities in 1994/1995 (SOU 2012:41), which enabled financial investment in ideas and projects originating from the university. The goal was “to strengthen Sweden’s innovation capacity, and thereby its competitiveness, employment rate and economic development” (SOU 2020:59, p. 53). In a similar vein, the Swedish Higher Education Act was revised with respect to collaboration in 1997, 2009 (SFS 1992:1434), and in 2021 (Prop. 2020/21:60), stressing the need to make research useful for society. Over time, state funding of research has been increasingly directed towards collaboration and innovation, expressed for instance by the implementation of a national agency for collaborative research and innovation, VINNOVA.

Along with changing and regularising the university–school–business relations, several market-based reforms in public education have led to a radical marketisation of the Swedish education system since the 1990s. It is now considered one of the most marketised education systems in the world, as exemplified by private tax-financed for-profit schools and a far-reaching commercialisation of educational goods and services such as professional development, and teaching materials (Dahlstedt & Fejes, 2019; Lundahl, Arreman, Holm, & Lundström, 2013). According to Rönnberg, Benerdal, Carlbaum, and Holm (2020), 25,000 companies operate within education in Sweden, with combined revenue of 45 billion SEK (approx. 4.3 billion EUR), including private delivery of formal education, as well as services and products offered to schools.

Another characteristic of the Swedish case is the successively strengthened link between compulsory education and research. Since 2010, as the first country in the world to have such a legal requirement, the Swedish Education Act states that education has a foundation in science and proven experience (SFS 2010:800). As argued by Bergmark and Hansson (2020, pp. 1–2): “With this, the government significantly increased demands on teachers and principals, forcing them to find ways to build research-based education”. The National School Inspectorate conducted a quality inspection in 2018, following up on how well schools and school authorities work to “create conditions and support for education to be based on science and proven experience” (The National School Inspectorate, 2019). Overall, the statutory requirements have resulted in intensified activities among schools and other education providers to gain access to “relevant” research.

Assetization of educational research

Our point of view and our argument is that these conditions described above open up for a certain kind of edu-business that is expected to produce economic and non-economic value from Triple Helix collaborations. To understand the valuation processes, we employ the notions of an asset (a resource with value that someone owns) and assetization (the production of value from real or imagined assets). These concepts help us further understand how the commercialisation of educational research concerns not only economic interests, but also the making of school and society. An asset could be knowledge, natural resources, infrastructure, pedagogical tools, or personal data, among other things, but as Birch and Muniesa (2020, pp. 24–25) argued, “almost anything can be turned into an asset given the right socio-technical configuration”. They also defined an asset as “something that can be owned or controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream, often involving the valuation of discounted future earnings in the present” (Birch & Muniesa, 2020, p. 9). The “rent-seeking rational” is essential to grasp the difference between assetization and nearby notions such as commodification (Birch & Muniesa, 2020, p. 26, cf. Komljenovic, 2020). An asset – such as a Triple Helix collaboration – confers advantages beyond the commodity itself (Muniesa et al., 2017) because, as mentioned above, it operates as a political technology that “privileges the power and valuations of the investor” (Langley, 2020, p. 5) and is thus governing future behaviour, organisations, and values. As Martin (2015) pointed out, expectations, and thus values and valuation, are not” spontaneously created … but have to be socially organised through the authoring of expectations and the enrolment of actors” (p. 425).

The notion of assetization recognises that the values produced in the commercial relations are not solely economic. Research collaborations could also be seen as investments in future ways of organising education, labour markets or universities (Milyaeva & Neyland, 2020). In addition, the notion of assetization attempts to escape the difference between “fictitious” and “real” values. Imagined value operates as an advantage if we consider it as inscribed and performed via social practices rather than as economic outcomes (Birch & Muniesa, 2020; Langley, 2020). The asset condition produces specific subjectivities, socialities, and practices and, as argued by Birch and Muniesa (2020, p. 25), “examining how things are turned into assets means to understand how material and immaterial assets are maintained or challenged as such”. In the present study, we ask how “research use” and “research collaboration” produce values – that is, become assets – in different ways in diverse edu-business contexts.

Methodological approach

This article builds on data from an ethnographic study in which we followed the work of education companies in the Swedish education market and related stakeholders. The data used for this article consist of interviews with 30 individuals, working in 10 business companies and three NGOs representing the business sector. In the study, interviewees from the NGOs and the companies were analysed in the same way since they represent the same sector and therefore work within similar discourse, and since they intend to produce value from assetization of educational research. They are all conceived of as edupreneurs (Rönnberg, 2017); that is, “actors involved in edu-business activities that in one way or another seek to shift the status quo in given areas of public policy, in this case education” (p. 235–236). The companies operate within the production and retailing of teaching materials, in-service teacher-training, consulting services and digital education products. They were selected for our study based on an initial mapping of the edu-market (Ideland et al., 2021). Therefrom, we approached companies in different business areas and of different sizes, ranging from a handful of employees to hundreds. All but two of the companies/NGOs that we contacted agreed to participate.

All interviewees appear in the study with fictional names. They provided signed informed consent and were given the opportunity to review and make changes in the transcript. To maintain the anonymity of the informants, the names of the companies have been omitted, as has redundant company information (Table 1).¹

Table 1. Overview of interviewees and companies referred to in the article.

	Main business activity	Interviewees
Company A	Digitalisation	Martin, Michael, Maria, Robin, Peter, Mats
Company B	Digitalisation	Petra, Jonas, Leif, Oscar, Pia
Company C	Digitalisation	Sara
Company D	School development	Ebba, Lena
Company E	Tech-transfer	John, Magnus
Company F	Teaching material	Victor
Company G	Research brokering, in-service teacher training	Bo, Benny
Company H	Substitute teacher agency	Viktoria
Company I	Substitute teacher agency	Clas
Company J	Digitalisation	Henrik, Katie, Marcus, Sophia
NGO A	Policy work	Madeleine, Nathalie
NGO B	Policy work	Christina, Hugo
NGO C	Research and policy work	Olof

The interviews lasted for 1–2.5 hours and followed a semi-structured interview guide, which served to open up a conversation about edupreneurial work, its content and premises, such as the companies’ relations to education providers and schools and their views and visions on schooling. Moreover, the interviewees were asked about the role of research within their work.

As Packer argued (2011), a qualitative analysis of interview material can be considered as the researchers’ meaning making of the interviews, rather than an inherently objective abstraction and generalisation of their content. Given such an understanding, the goal of analysis becomes “to learn from the interviews a fresh way of seeing things, not to reconstruct the subjective experience of the interviewee, or what some phenomenon ‘mean to them’” (Packer, 2011, p. 119). In this specific case, the interpretation of the data was carried out in four main steps: (1) an inductive content analysis of the excerpts that aimed to identify recurrent themes, to be used as point of departures for more profound analysis²; (2) reduction of the data, for the purposes of this article, in which we extracted all material that we associated with research, research use and collaboration, coded for example as “science”, “university”, “research”, and “funding bodies” (approx. 19,000 words)³; (3) an in-depth analysis in which the selected transcripts were scrutinised in close proximity to how the discursive trope of the Triple Helix (that is, striving for academia/business/school collaborations) produces different ideal types for “using” research and research collaborations; and (4) how these types interplay with different processes of assetization (that is, the production of values, both in the present and in the future) (Birch & Muniesa, 2020). More specifically, we asked: What ideal types can we identify when it comes to using, translating, packaging, and selling research to schools? What is considered as assets in these ideal types, and how is it socially organised, controlled and capitalised (Birch & Muniesa, 2020; Martin, 2015)? What values are inscribed, for school, edu-business, or academia, in and through the various relations that the interviewees described?

Through this analytical process, we ended up with distinguishing five ideal types that we found meaningful to theorise, since they are relevant to the aim of this study and representative of our data. These types were not categorised based on their company structure or type of commodity for sale, but on how the edupreneurs talk about use of research within their businesses. The names given to the ideal types are metaphorical rather than empirical and aim to highlight significant and complex facets of the assetization of educational research. However, the conceptualisation is limited to the data and theories at hand and could be challenged by additional data or other theoretical framings. Also, constructing ideal types might mean that ambiguities in the data are hidden, which should be recognised. The complexity discussed is between – not within – the ideal types. Nevertheless, even though we cannot provide an exhaustive account of existing ways of using research and research collaborations in this context, we argue that the study contributes to a deepened understanding of how “useful research” is produced by edu-business actors.

Results

In this section, the goal is to describe and theorise the interplay among research, edu-business actors, and schools through the theoretical lens of assetization. This is accomplished by presenting the five different ideal types that we distinguished in our data, and which we have named to illustrate the different use of research and research collaborations: Brokers, Ambassadors, Engineers, Philanthropists and Influencers. For each type, one company or NGO was selected as the main illustration, to which complementary examples have been added.

Brokers

The Brokers are edupreneurs working to translate research into commodities such as conferences, in-service teacher training, newsletters, or academic literature, or to assemble and translate the experienced needs of schools into objects for research. In the data, edupreneurs discuss how they work to define important issues for research and to connect academics with people in the education and business sector (e.g. Olof, Madeleine, Oscar), or turn research into textbooks (Victor).

Packaging and trading research is a growing industry taking place on a global scale (Hogan & Thomson, 2017; Verger, Novelli, & Altinyelken, 2018), but also in local and national networks like Company G. Its customers are primarily school staff, for which the company provides in-service-training, conferences and disseminates research. Also, the company hosts a research institute that funds projects in which teachers and academic scholars interact. Thus, they strive for both disseminating selected research results and to make sure that academia focuses what is assumed as problems coming from “teachers” needs’. Departing from that good intention, the company – as Birch and Muniesa (2020) noted – controls, trades, and capitalises on educational research.

The company founder Bo described how, more than 20 years ago, the company started due to frustration about research being difficult for schools and school authorities to reach. Bo described the outset as a search for “useful” research and then building networks with academics representing that research. Disseminating research to schools:

Is about being skilled at finding, selecting, and constraining what will be sent out. And then you [as a school leader or teacher] look through the 10-top news in the letter and feel satisfied. (Bo, Company G)

The asset for the brokers is the research in itself as it is expected to produce continuing businesses through the privilege of defining the usefulness of research. Bo is confident regarding what is useful and what is not:

[Sarcastically] Let’s say that we published a really nice article in a Chicago-based scientific journal, costing 100,000 kronor. But hell, that is not how to use public funds. The chairperson of the municipality council must be able to say, “Yes, it costs 100,000, but now we know that the kids in our preschools learn more, and that was the point.” That is how it was useful. (Bo, Company G)

Good scientific practices and outcomes, from the point of view of the broker, deals with the question of “more learning” – the research must have value beyond the scientific community. The recurring theme in this interview is the need for value for public money, recalling that both researchers and teachers/school leaders are working in a public space where the idea of utility is key; the goal for research should be the effectiveness of student learning (cf. Hogan & Thomson, 2017). That means that the economic value of the research is closely entangled with a specific pedagogical value; namely, a certain view of the effectiveness of teaching – which is also materialised in Company G’s in-service teacher training and school/academia collaborations. Not least by virtue of their position as funding body for research projects, the company also intervenes with what scholars in educational sciences engage in, which could be considered to organise the future in a preferred way. Hence, a second asset for the brokers is their networks of teachers and scholars, mobilised through the possibility of funding. These networks, organised by a discourse on desired Triple Helix collaborations, provides the company with credibility and is an investment in the future. Thereby, through the assetization of research, Brokers control the idea of useful educational research and, in the long run, the norms for the teacher profession. This means that the assetization of educational research also produces academic and even political values.

Ambassadors

Ambassadors, as an ideal type for edu-business, are edupreneurs who act as spokespersons for a certain subfield of research. For instance, the school developing consultants Ebba and Lena (Company D) spoke for nudging (a behavioural economics theory) and Viktoria (Company H), head of a headhunting company in the educational sector, claimed interest in “anything that has to do with selection and matching and behavioral science”. Benny (Company G) explained the importance of hiring a specific researcher to write the company’s “research base”, while Petra, Jonas, and Leif (Company B) raised how their company “ties up” researchers who are, or are believed to be, sharing the company’s “beliefs”. For ambassadors, the value of research is its capacity to become a credible intellectual frame for a certain product or service.

This ideal type is illustrated here by a company that works to develop, sell, and teach teachers about digital products. The interviewees at the company share a common vision of how education could be changed for the better through digitalisation in combination with methods based on research in Assessment for Learning (AFL). Martin (Company A) stated: “We believe in a formative process. Very much. Our product relies on that and it goes hand in hand with Assessment for Learning”. AFL influences the company culture and serves as a track for the staff’s professional development into “modern research” (Mats, Company A). The company’s digital products and in-service training have incorporated this specific line of research. Robin explained how their products and services become mediators for AFL research:

How do we make visible what the students learn? Hence, we lean very much on Dylan William’s ideas and we have built the products to make recurrent feedback easy, to make visible how and what students learn so that the teacher can give immediate feedback. (Robin, Company A)

The asset for Company A is what appears as a strong commercial-intellectual relation to the “father” of AFL, who charges the product/company with evidence-based legitimacy. For schools, the company has a vision of a desired future to which their digital products, together with AFL, constitutes the solution. It is organised by regularly inviting the embodied asset to lecture for teachers. The lectures aim to inspire, but also to build a community with the schools that can allow for possible future profit. “Modern research” – mediated through software, courses, and seminars – creates a desire for the product, provides the company with credibility and economic profit, increases the researcher’s academic renown, and is claimed to improve the Swedish school system. Thus, the “adoption” of a specific line of research means that it becomes translated into an ideology, with political values, guiding workplace culture, their digital products and in-service training.

The Ambassadors at Company A try to collaborate with Swedish universities, but end up engaging with an international academic superstar. This close interplay is their main research asset, producing present and future pedagogical and economical values in their striving for increased business and an improvement of schools. The assetization process through this Triple Helix collaboration does not primarily transform the research in itself (beyond the scholar’s fame), but possibly the practices and ideals of teaching and learning, and it also opens up for continuing business and future gains.

Engineers

The ideal type that we distinguished as Engineers include companies that develop and trade innovations through university research. In terms of what concerns the educational sciences at Swedish universities, very few companies have been initiated with the aim of commercialising research in a structured manner. The only such example in our data is a tech-to-school-trade company that derives from medical sciences, that has a stronger tradition than educational science, to “commercialize scientific results and ideas” (SOU 2020:59), in line with the embedded ideas within the Triple Helix. Company E started when two researchers who innovated a diagnostic test were connected to a business consultant via a university innovation platform. One of the researchers told the story of the origin:

And there was the embryo that this might be practically applicable. Partly because it is seen as a quite objective method … There are a lot of subjective components in the tests that were currently in use. We realized that we could give an additional tool to teachers … It was during that time we came in contact with the innovation office whose mission is to help researchers transform research ideas, to bring them out from the lab into reality. (Magnus, Company E)

As a boundary crosser between academia and business, Company E obtained funding from agencies such as VINNOVA and also from retailing the product.⁴ When the test was commodified, the two researchers started to share their working hours between academia and the business company to develop and sell their product and also to keep teaching and researching:

People do this in different ways. Some won’t leave academia, others quit and work only like that [commercially]. But their academic career was important to them; they are passionate about their research and wanted to continue with it. This was a good solution. (John, Company E)

John is not a researcher himself, but the fact that his company is run partly by researchers makes the product and the company trustworthy. Company E is growing in Sweden and abroad and was brought up by other edupreneurs as a good example of research collaborations. Company E appears as a role model for the commercialisation of education research and the evidence-based business company. However, the company criticised the edu-business sector at the same time as positioning itself as “real research”:

Many [in the business sector] play the ‘research card’. I used to say that even if there are researchers in the room, if nothing is published there is nothing. So, to be evidence-based, there should be more requirements on the industry. You can join, but then you must actually prove that you can deliver high quality. (John, Company E)

Here, the asset is the high-quality label that is attached to what is considered “real research”. Compared to the Brokers, Engineers’ research trade is not about selecting and communicating “useful research”. On the contrary, the company sells one product based on the business owners’ own research; this also distinguishes the Engineers from the Ambassadors, who develop products without having any scientific competence themselves. Nor do Engineers try to change school in any ideological sense; they capitalise from their innovation because it can be traded as a “useful tool” for solving certain problems in schools.

The assetized research not only creates pedagogic and economic value, but also academic value. By utilising research, the scholars themselves obtain a stronger position within the entrepreneurial university. The value of the product and the researchers/businesspeople themselves are not seemingly “stained” by commercial interest. Rather, their present and future value increases as they are taking positions as entrepreneurial scholars supporting schools. Within the discursive trope of the Triple Helix, they could be seen as exemplary.

Philanthropists

The Philanthropists in our material are companies that finance research at universities with the aim of boosting a certain kind of research. This act entails that the company’s brand is promoted as socially responsible. In the literature, this is sometimes described as philantrocapitalism, a practice that relies on “the idea that the investor’s viewpoint is best positioned to see where the money can do most good” (Birch & Muniesa, 2020, p. 23).

The university linkage seems to be a competition advantage at the edu-market, whose value is a recurrent conversation theme in the interviews. Besides using, brokering, or developing research, there are companies that fund university research that is considered important for the sector and for the company as such. As Philanthropists, they invest in social networks to gain credibility, which means that the research asset has social and political value.

One education manager at a large company revealed that, within the company’s corporate social responsibility programme, a doctoral student is funded for working on a project that is relevant to the company’s products. This investment is described as having a two-fold aim:

Partly, it is a way of giving something back. We earn money from the digitalization of school and this is a way to contribute with something. But mostly it is about creating … My experience is that we can’t rely on [existing] research to know what a good school leadership is for [the implementation of our product]. We couldn’t find anything. So that was why we wanted to contribute, to deepen the knowledge. (Oscar, Company B)

As Muniesa et al. (2017, p. 12) argued, processes of assetization are techniques for “prospective valuation”, for which the “financial value amounts to a future return anticipated through a calculation of the cost of capital rather than to a ‘price’ given to the asset on the market” (Muniesa, 2017, p. 449). However, the dissertation project is also a risk: “If this goes awry, funding a PhD is a very bad activity. But there must be companies that dare to take those risks. At the end of the day, it is about being a viable company” (Oscar, Company B). On the other hand, Oscar argued that funding research is a way of strengthening corporate social responsibility. In other words, it is good for branding, regardless of what comes out of it. When asked whether the funding is a way to steer results, Oscar responded:

I have no insight into which results … will come out of research we finance. As I see it, that is a strength … We are one of the first [companies] to have financed research within this faculty. It is much more common in engineering and medicine. We will probably meet one or another who finds it strange and will try to criticize … But whatever the results of that research, it won’t affect me as a supplier at all. (Oscar, Company B)

Instead, the collaboration with and funding of research gives the company insights and credibility, and was proudly mentioned by other interviewees from the company (Petra, Jonas, and Leif). Oscar described how they became better suppliers of products and services, since they gain confidence as well as credibility through the university collaboration.

In other words, for Philanthropists, financing research means initiating collaborations that promise both present and future values. Here and now, the economic support of research operates as a “brand”, but also as corporate confidence, as paying back to the sector they make profit from: school. Ultimately, the research investment is believed to both steer the academic work into what the company consider “necessary” studies, and to change classroom practices – an aim similar to what was described within the ideal type of the Brokers. Thus, the economic investment in research – the doctoral student – becomes an asset as it authors the expectations and their social, academic, and pedagogical value.

Influencers

The Influencers do not sell products per se. Instead, working in NGO environments, they represent the interests of others and to steer the public discourse through different kinds of policy work, such as hiring researchers and publishing reports on selected themes. At the core of this ideal type is the mobilisation of a certain public agenda in order to, as Birch and Muniesa (2020, p. 28) argued, turn publics into assets.

Influencers connect central actors within policy, academia, business, and education. As Olof, an NGO representative, explained, these exchanges can unfold through quite informal encounters, such as during joint travel expeditions, arranged by his organisation:

We brought a delegation consisting of the National agency of education, SALAR,⁵ VINNOVA, school authorities, business actors, and researchers [abroad] … It was a way to create a meeting opportunity for Swedish actors from industry, school authorities, schools, and universities. (Olof, NGO C)

Further, by publishing reports, Influencers contribute to the discourse on how education should be organised. Hugo, who represents a business sector NGO that, among many other activities, produces reports on well-chosen topics, stated:

When we need material for reports or seminars, or regarding various issues, we look for people who we think are suitable for the topic, ensuring they have the knowledge we are looking for. Sometimes it is a researcher, sometimes a retired state official, and sometimes it is a university student. (Hugo, NGO B)

Using research for policy purposes must be done without the research becoming “dirty” (political, tendentious). This is achieved by choosing the author carefully. Thus, the academic position of the scholar becomes an asset that ensures the credibility of the report – and the political initiatives connected to it. However, the NGO has the privileged position to formulate the question and the content that frames the outcome:

Of course, we choose the topic and we order a report with a certain content. But we don’t ask for a certain result … It also depends on who you ask. Calling is a privilege … you have something in mind … Sometimes you don’t agree … then we get a little bit picky about what to highlight as it’s being displayed. (Hugo, NGO B)

A common feature of what we have thematised as the Influencer position is the effort to govern the formulation of problems in the public and political sphere, in which research has an authoritative function. As Langley (2020, p. 5) puts it, the asset operates as a political technology that “privileges the power and valuations of the investor”.

For Influencers, the economic profit is not expected to be either immediate or a direct effect of research collaboration and use. Rather, it is a long-term investment, not in the academic research but in the issue of adapting school to the needs of the business sector. Thus, research is valued in political terms, appearing as an asset that must be tamed and used to ensure future earnings (cf. Birch & Muniesa, 2020), by setting the agenda for public debate. Unlike the Ambassadors, the Influencers set out to represent the interest of others and position themselves as nodes for connecting these interests with researchers that write reports from the “desired” perspective. Through this assetization of research, certain questions are asked and certain results are produced – not with the aim of being useful for school, but for the business sector. Influencers target the public and policy spheres, aiming to change the agenda rather than sell certain products.

Conclusion and discussion

In this paper, we have sketched five ideal types for how edupreneurs use, relate to, and translate research and research collaborations into sellable products and ideas. The modes of collaborations appear diverse and include economic investments in PhD positions (Philanthropists) or in research projects (Brokers), engaging the “right scholars” for specific missions (Influencers), building networks with and among school staff, academic scholars, and policymakers (Brokers, Ambassadors, Influencers), translating and building upon established research (Ambassadors and Brokers), and trading research innovations (Engineers). As we have shown, the interconnections among academia, edu-business and school are manifold, sometimes leaning towards the interests of research and sometimes towards school development or business interests. For some, the goal is grand, such as to change education policy or the ways teachers teach and students learn. For others, the scope of the outcome is more limited, such as gaining credibility for the company or implementing and trading their own research. We understand this as different assetizations of research that produce different values. These values could be (1) economic – research use and academic collaborations contribute to a company’s credibility, strengthening the organisation, the brand, and its customer relations; (2) pedagogical – the asset of research is used to change the practices of teaching and learning; (3) political – lobbying for a fundamental change regarding educational policy; (4) academic – the company contributes to the definition of research that is useful for school and academia, thereby also controlling the future research focus, and; (5) social – a way to build networks that are gaining value now and in the future.

With the aim of understanding how research and research collaborations have become important for business actors, we depart from an assumption that the Triple Helix operates as a discursive trope that invites actors to act from certain positions, with certain discursive conditions. This trope assembles discourses on entrepreneurial universities, useful research, innovative edu-business, and a public sector (school) in need of scientific support. It organises the interviewees’ ways of talking about and using research in order to become more prominent, efficient, and reliable. As the present study has shown, it also invites the conviction that collaborations among universities, schools, and the business sector ought to be naturalised, but not unconditionally. What is valid research and what is not should not be decided “from above” (the university), but from the “reality”, meaning schools, business companies or NGOs. The latter two seem to stand in the node position, selecting, translating, and trading academic research into policy or manageable methods and products. The edu-business companies also operate in the opposite direction by defining what problems should be transformed into useful research. Through these processes, the companies seek legitimacy, which is also an important asset on the edu-market. “The power of research” (Enright et al., 2020) is believed to be helpful in such enterprise.

However, educational research is not unanimously regarded as a good thing. According to the interviewed edupreneurs, universities need to revise their views on collaboration with business sectors, as well as the methods and outcomes of their research (Chantler, 2016; Etzkowitz et al., 2008). The different kinds of values produced by research assetization are not necessarily compatible. For example, the academic value produced by theoretical outcomes and academic publications is not regarded either as economically profitable or as pedagogically useful. Even though we do not disregard Triple Helix collaborations in educational sciences/business per se, we would like to end this article with a couple of questions. Firstly, does the emergence of edu-business, combined with a political and societal focus on research use, push educational sciences in undesired directions, such as becoming profitable/practical rather than complex/critical (cf. Popkewitz, 2020)? To quote Loughland and Thompson (2015, p. 114), research within the knowledge economy is often “timely, achievable and politically expedient rather than necessarily educationally desirable”. A remaining question, then, is what “research use” becomes in the third string of the Triple Helix – school – when its existence and dissemination is translated through commercial interests. What does it mean for an education system struggling to become “based on science”?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by Swedish Research Council [DNR 2017-01657] and Crafoord Foundation [DNR 20180742].

Notes on contributors

Malin Ideland

Malin Ideland is professor of Educational Sciences and docent in Ethnology at the Faculty of Education and Society at Malmö University, Sweden. Her primary research interests concern the marketization and neoliberal governing of education and how cultural norms organize education.

Margareta Serder

Margareta Serder has a PhD in Science and Mathematics Education from Malmö University, where she is Assistant Professor of Educational Sciences. Serder’s research interests include education policy, large-scale assessment and the use of research outside the universities.

Notes

1. No ethical approval was required for the study according to Swedish guidelines for good research practice (Swedish Research Council, 2017).

2. This step was a collaborative effort within the research team of five scholars.

3. The interview transcripts were then reread to ensure that the extracted quotes were not taken out of context and that essential parts of the interviews not had been missed through the coding process.

4. In the data we found examples of business/university collaboration funded by VINNOVA (e.g. Michael, Petra), but these cases are small projects rather than a base for establishing a company.

5. Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions.