ENABLING ACADEMICS TO HABITUALLY TRANSLATE DISCIPLINARY KNOWLEDGE TO OFFERINGS THAT MEET SOCIETAL NEEDS

Patrick Oseloka EZEPUE, PhD

User-Centred Research and Design, Statistics, Business Analytics, Stochastic Modelling in Business and Finance, Entrepreneurship and The Digital Economy?

Oselux Analytics and AfriWorld Higher Education and Research Observatory, UK

Ezinne Michaelia EZEPUE, PhD?

Theatre Arts and Film Studies, University of Nigeria

Post-Doctoral Researcher in Germany African Storytelling, Internationale Filmschule, Cologne, Germany?

Abstract

This article explores the need for traditional academics to become corporate academics, who are able to translate their know-hows in research, teaching and learning to meaningful offerings that meet the complete needs of individuals, teams, organisations and countries in the Global Quadruple Helix - academia, government, industry, and wider society. These offerings include products, services, digital firms, wealth, jobs, and happiness. They enable academics to generate portfolio incomes in addition to their core traditional academic engagements. Importantly, the paper examines how to scale these efforts by infusing the Entertainment Mystique into their work. A puzzle to address is, Why can't academics be incentivised to achieve similar successes as the celebrities mentioned in this paper, personally and within departmental Centres for the Applications of Every Discipline (CFAEDs)? Relatedly, we explore how the corporate academic celebrity business model empowers women and answers two further puzzles posed by the second author in a recent publication, ‘If stereotyping women in postcolonial African films shaped women into conformity, can the changing portrayal into more assertive behaviours create a reversal? Can it lead to behavioural modification and the emancipation of African women?’

Key Terms

Traditional Academics, Corporate Academics, Higher Education, RIAT Ensemble, Global Q-Helix, Global Corporate Academicism, CfAEDs, Portfolio Incomes, Socio-Economic Development, Nigeria, Sub-Sahara Africa, Developing countries of the Global South, Entertainment Mystique, Story Telling, Humour, Fims, Women Empowerment, Reverse Pedagogy, Edge of Creativity, Global Higher Education Summits

INTRODUCTION

We note that a Vision of Corporate Academicism that motivates ideas in this article is stated at https://afriworldpublishing.com/philosophy , its chief element being ‘To Transform and Democratise Global Education and Change’. Recognising the need to use the Corporate Academic Model explored in Ezepue (2018)’s Secrets of the Masters: Model-Based Huper-Performance in the Corporate Academic Business of Life, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344576216 , to train a new cadre of academics who can accelerate their personal, national and continental socio-economic development far better than traditional higher education, this paper particularly explores the need to bring in the Entertainment Mystique into higher education.

The Entertainment Mystique is a concept that explains why the largest career earnings in the world flow to elite sports stars, tech titans, media moguls, reality TV, music, films, and artists in the media, entertainment and performance industry generally. Think of Beyonce, Adele, Flavour, Rihanna, Madonna, Lionel Messi, Ronaldo, Elon Musk, Nadal, Roger Federer,? Tyson Fury, AJ, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. For example, reality TV is a relatively unexplored part of the entertainment industry as regards education. Instead of nude reality TV that dominates the creative industry now, what about having more creative higher education TV shows which will present important research, teaching and learning concepts to wider audiences? An example is doing such TV shows in order to portray the fundamental importance of the corporate academic model in personal and national development? Just call it The Corporate Academic just like The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den.

Despite the franchising into Nigeria, say, of programmes like Big Brother Nigeria, Nigeria is Got Talent, similar opportunities in South Africa and such individual artistes' creations as Nigeria's Omotola, there is a need for academics in related disciplines to join the fray, bringing in their technical knowledge to deepen the talent people, improve their financial well-being, and use the resulting street credibility to burnish their classroom dynamics and pedagogical repertoire. Unfortunately, this is not happening enough, if at all. Thus, academic work remains isolated from the rest of society, merely representing career games that academics play.

In our conversations on these ideas, dating back to January 2023, Ezinne noted that the power of well-told stories to make these engagements successful should be mainstreamed, not only in the performance arts but also across all disciplines. Examples of successful translation of disciplinary knowledge to lucrative and societally relevant practices include Pentecostal Churches which 'professionalise' Theology and Religion, Statistical Consulting, Civil Engineering and Medical Sciences. The thesis point here is that even these fields require the Entertainment Mystique to become more successful. This is why there are captivating choirs that surround worship in churches, with ambient music, drums and dancing.

For example, to teach mathematical sciences to different levels of students, one requires humour, memorable choice of examples from their everyday lives. It also requires the ability to playfully take the students to the Edge of Creativity such as in the ways eminent mathematical scientists successfully use their learning to resolve challenging problems across academia, public services, industry sectors and wider society (the Global Q-Helix). These examples abound in all disciplines and simply require immersions in the four areas of the core higher education business, namely research, integration of knowledge, applications and teaching, fondly called the RIAT Ensemble in higher education. We have developed a very innovative Reverse Pedagogy for enabling learners to master these skills, through immersions in the IoK and A elements, contextualised by surrounding bodies of R within a well-staged classroom dynamics. See Ezepue (2023) Insights from Two Leadership Styles: Hen Versus Duck, Reverse Pedagogy And Effective Teaching in Higher Education, https://medium.com/@cared.riat.ssgs/insights-from-two-leadership-styles-hen-duck-reverse-pedagogy-and-effective-teaching-in-higher-8dbc4fe0f182 .?

The intellectual puzzles addressed in this paper are, Why can't academics be incentivised to achieve similar successes as the celebrities alluded to above, personally and within departmental Centres for the Applications of Every Discipline (CFAEDs)? How can the priorities of the professoriate be reimagined to facilitate this, say by requiring them to master and generate evidence of excellence in all elements of the RIAT Ensemble, especially Integration of Knowledge and Applications, which are the royal roads to success in this quest? For the women in higher education and the professions, How can the corporate academic celebrity business model empower women and provide answers to two further puzzles posed by the second author in a recent publication, ‘If stereotyping women in postcolonial African films shaped women into conformity, can the changing portrayal into more assertive behaviours create a reversal? Can it lead to behavioural modification and the emancipation of African women?’ Please, see Ezinne Michaelia Ezepue (2023)’s Womanhood Beyond Stereotypes: Interrogating Women and Future-Making in Contemporary African Films in In book: Narratives Crossing Boundaries: Storytelling in a Transmedial and Transdisciplinary Context, Joachim Friedmann (ed.), Publisher: Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, DOI: 10.14361/9783839464861 .

These puzzles boil down to a summative question. What kinds of integrated business models do they need to understand in order to actualize the Corporate Academic Vision, the Oselux Vision? To understand why this vision almost says it all, we recall it fully as follows.?

‘To Live a Spirit-Led, Project-Based Life, Transforming and Democratising Global Education and Change, By Continually Up-skilling Global Citizens, Teams, Organizations, Countries, and Continents, Creating Innovative Products, Services, Digital Firms, Wealth, Jobs, Enhancing the Peace, Prosperity, Joy, and Happiness of Individuals and Countries, Especially Nigeria, Africa, and Developing Countries of the Global South, and Publishing the Ideas Through Multimedia Channels Across the Q-Helix’.

For a complete big picture of the contexts of these puzzles, we take liberties to recall below the full abstract to Ezinne Ezepue (2023)’s paper.

‘Japhet & Feek, 1 as well as other scholars, have indicated that fictional narratives can be used successfully as an agent of change. My research argues that African men, benefiting from the superior position Colonialism left them, have used Film as a medium to tame and shape African women, defining expectations for women, prescribing the 'acceptable' virtues, and discouraging 'unwholesome' and 'unbecoming' behaviours. Throughout postcolonial Africa, women have been thus stereotyped , usually portrayed as one-dimensional characters who are extremely good, loyal, and virtuous or portrayed in antagonistic ways as ill-mannered, impatient, and poorly groomed. But in contemporary Africa, the tables are turning and questions are being asked about existing orders and the definitions of woman and womanhood. Women are increasingly becoming active in the industry, and this is warranting that their portrayals in films are changing. What is the implication of this? If stereotyping women in postcolonial African films shaped women into conformity, can the changing portrayal create a reversal? Can it lead to behavioural modification and the emancipation of African women? This article aims at understanding the possibilities of using fictional narratives to affect concrete behavioural modifications in how the African woman is perceived and understood. Through content analysis of selected films from across African film industries, especially those directed by women, this study intends to establish how differently women are being portrayed and what this could mean for Africa and African women of the future’.

To reiterate the summative question for this paper, What kinds of integrated business models do they [male and female academics] need to understand in order to actualize the Corporate Academic Vision, the Oselux Vision? As argued intimately in Ezepue (March 2023) The Corporate Academic Business Model, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369365373 and Ezepue (April 2023) The Many Faces of Publishing, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370068626 , academics are enjoined to adapt the strategies explored in the papers to excel in making their disciplinary work across the RIAT Ensemble, far more excellent and high-impact across academia, public services, industry sectors and wider society (the Global Q-Helix), than is possible in traditional higher education.

Hence, these papers explore some thirty-one contributions to knowledge that corporate academics make in the Q-Helix, compared to about five in traditional academia. Hence, a good way to start the envisaged mainstreaming of corporate academicism in Africa, say, is to develop a Reality TV programme called The Corporate Academic, mimicking The Apprentice, and The Great British Bake Off, for example. We are now working on this film under the auspices of Oselux Entertainments and Omnimedia. These Reality TV engagements will require collaborations of academics and actors in related fields - Theatre Arts, Films, Mass Communication, for example with Nollywood actors and other media and entertainment professionals in Africa and globally. The remits of the wider corporate academic celebrity business model agenda include higher education TV, reality TV, films, multimedia communications, podcasts, YouTube Academies,? developing related talent pools in the creative industries, partner-funded programmes and academic and global publishing such as AfriWorld Publishing, www.afriworldpublishing.com .

CONCLUSION

We reiterate how these ideas resolve the intellectual puzzles we set out to address at the beginning. For easy follow-through we recall the puzzles below and feed in the responses.

Why can't academics be incentivised to achieve similar successes as the celebrities alluded to above, personally and within departmental Centres for the Applications of Every Discipline (CFAEDs)? They can but are wrongly incentivised to intentionally work across the Global Q-Helix the way explained in this paper and related references. They aim to maximally publish for promotion, thus playing what we can call a Riat system with too much attention to the Research and publishing, many times neglecting genuine teaching and meaningful IoK and A work. In Oselux Global Education, we give enough attention to all the RIAT elements and produce actionable knowledge from all, hence the enhanced capacities to make many contributions to knowledge, as mentioned above. It is in the CfAEDS that academics, students, graduates and professionals are drilled in key protocols for producing such actionable knowledge, see all references in this paper.

How can the priorities of the professoriate be reimagined to facilitate this, say by requiring them to master and generate evidence of excellence in all elements of the RIAT Ensemble, especially Integration of Knowledge and Applications, which are the royal roads to success in this quest? This is clearly a question-answer statement. Hence, higher educational institutions will be supported by the Oselux ecosystem of digital educational platforms, https://linktr.ee/ssgsacademy , to properly set up CfAEDs which are far more novel than traditional research and consulting units. This is business-critical for transforming higher education in developing countries and even globally. Hence, in a series of Global Higher Education Summits planned for this year, the first scheduled for 24-25 November 2023, we run workshops on how to set up such CfAEDs, See Forthcoming Events at https://linktr.ee/ssgsacademy .?

For the women in higher education and the professions, How can the corporate academic celebrity business model empower them and provide answers to two further puzzles posed by the second author in a recent publication, ‘If stereotyping women in postcolonial African films shaped women into conformity, can the changing portrayal into more assertive behaviours create a reversal? Can it lead to behavioural modification and the emancipation of African women?’ Given the insights in the Oslux Vision, we can safely say that giving women academics and professionals the deep training on the enabling corporate academic protocols - The Research Methods Canvas(c), the 5 Forces-7Es of Education System, for example -? will phenomenally empower them to easily leapfrog the performance of their male colleagues, who are not so drilled. This way, they can make as many of the thirty-one contributions to knowledge as their disciplines allow. Also, given the insights from the above-mentioned abstract from Ezinne Ezepue’s paper, we can also say that increasingly assertive women who are more exposed to uncommon hyper-performance from the corporate academic model and its knowledge production protocols, will emancipate as fully as envisioned in the abstract. In Oselux we have structured such hyper-performance coaching services for women as an urgently needed empowerment programme.?