A lot is expected of UK universities. One demand that has – since the mid-19^th Century – competed with the central mission of teaching undergraduates and pursuing excellence in research, is the demand that universities support growth and innovation in the economy.

This demand has recently become more pronounced following the publication of various government policy documents such as the Wilson Review. Following on from our work on The Edgeless University, this project examines how UK higher education institutions can respond to this demand through adopting ‘open’ approaches to various activities. 

At the moment, UK higher education institutions undertake a number of activities that support growth and innovation:

• securing the research base
• knowledge transfer
• collaborating on research with industry
• providing consultancy services to business
• creating ‘spin-out’ companies
• supporting product commercialisation
• undertaking R&D.

Open Landscape will lay out how these activities might be augmented by adopting various ‘open approaches’, both at the level of institutions and the sector as a whole. For the purposes of this report, these approaches comprise:

• open access
• open science
• open scholarship
• open innovation
• open data
• open standards.

The open landscape these approaches populate is a fast-changing one driven not only by technological change but also policy. For example, the current government has made plain its support for openness through various reports and White Papers, not least the recent Finch Review of open access and the Cabinet Office White Paper on open data.

The final report for this project will be published as a JISC Digital Infrastructure Directions Report in late autumn 2012. The report will provide information and guidance to institutions on how to navigate the open landscape, with a focus on supporting innovation and growth. The report will also outline policy directions that will need to be followed if the UK higher education sector is to safely grasp the opportunities open approaches seem to offer.

This project is funded by JISC, the Joint Information Services Committee.