Research On Corporate University In The Perspective Of Higher Education

Corporate university, which germinated in10s or20s of the20th century at the western companies, have achieved remarkable development in last half century. Its function, structure and characteristics had extremely profound changes, especially under the promotion of the confluence of two major trends of informationization and globalization. Although corporate universities were rooted in the production practice, they are relatively independent of the traditional system of higher education and differ from one another. In their gradual development process of practice, they have not only proved their value, but also found their respective ways to success. However, the specific corporate university’s success is clearly difficult to promote and emulate, since the business organizations differ from stage of development, kinds of industry and the country’s socio-cultural and economic soil. Meanwhile, the corporate university research lags far behind the vigorously growing corporate university practice, for corporate universities came into being based on their parent enterprises’s own development needs and their practice were prior to study. In recent years, the foreign researches on corporate university from the perspective of enterprise development have made a series of significant progress. But, unfortunately, in all sectors of society, especially in the field of higher education practice and research, little is known about the corporate university as yet. This affects not only the healthy development of corporate universities in China, but also the degree of openness of Chinese higher education, especially their contacts and cooperation with the modern enterprise and enterprise system, since many unique experiences and valuable ideas of corporate university can not be timely drawn by Chinese higher education practice and research.In this dissertation, the enterprise university research was from the perspective of higher education and mainly carried out the following three areas.First, the history and current situation of the development of corporate university was deeply studied. By studying the course of development of corporate university, its characteristics of the development were summed up, and its overall development of the law and trends were analyzed, as well as its internal and external development drivers. Based on practice research and combined with typical cases, this thesis gave a comprehensive analysis and induction of the current development and common features of modern corporate university, from its internal and external relations, operation mode, and product certification to its scope of services, form of existence, and attributes and scale of the organization. Also, the organization nature and operating logic of corporate university were elaborated, and a number of important issues raised in the development of corporate universities were discussed.Second, a comparative study from the perspective of higher education was carried out between corporate university and relevant higher education institutions, and between corporate university and correlated concepts, with the emphasis on differences and relations between corporate university and institutions of higher education, such as traditional university, university of industry, business school, higher vocational college and higher education company. Then there was an in-depth analysis of the organization nature and operating logic of corporate university. On this basis the discriminations between corporate university and higher education, corporate university and university, corporate university and learning organization and corporate university and other related concepts were discussed, and then the definitions of them were put forward. The thesis argued that corporate university is mainly engaged in serving working adult continuing education; its high-end belongs to the category of higher vocational education, and its origin and development stems from the internal demands of the knowledge elements and professional knowledge production services of the parent enterprise. Corporate university is funded by the parent enterprise, so it is a new kind of specialized multi-function learning organization, which is part of the parent enterprise and serves the parent business’s development strategy, business management, and the core business. Corporate university provides a kind of knowledge production services based on the production practices logic, which is integrated with the production practices of the parent enterprise and can not be replaced by any other higher education institutions, unlike traditional university’s disciplines logic. Corporate university takes the view of knowledge seeking for practicality and perfection as the guide; developing the learning ability and business wisdom of enterprise as the mission; specialized knowledge production services as the support; learning in the whole process of a comprehensive study by all employees as the base; serving the development strategy as the core; improving the job performance as the guidance; optimizing and maximizing the knowledge effectiveness as the purpose; enhancing the core competitiveness and achieving the sustainable development of enterprises as the target.Third, the value of the corporate university and the inspiration of that for the diversified innovative development of higher education were brought up according to the challenges of the times higher education faces. Three important implications of corporate university to the modern higher education research and practice were summarized:For one thing, corporate university expands the boundaries of higher education in the era of knowledge economy in the field of higher vocational education, adult education, continuing education and lifelong education. Secondly, the effectiveness, diversification, informationization and internationalization of higher education are promoted by corporate university and the innovation of university system and mechanism as well. Thirdly, the entrepreneurial spirit of the information age is imported into the cultural concept of higher education.A thorough research of corporate universities’law of development, common characteristics, nature and operating logic from the perspective of higher education can give scientific guidance to the practice of corporate university. Thus the design, establishment, operation, management, construction and development of corporate university can follow the objective laws. And therefor we can forecast the development trends, make scientific evaluation and guide the healthy development of the corporate university.It’s just meeting the needs of practice innovations and theoretical research of Chinese current higher education to probe into corporate university from the perspective of higher education. The development of higher education in21st century is facing unprecedented challenges and opportunities. The uprise and rapid development of entrepreneurial university, higher education company and corporate university show that higher education plays an increasingly important role in the knowledge economy. Then here comes the question:How can higher education better serve the knowledge-based economy and play the key role in the development and production of such knowledge elements as technological innovation and human capital? The answer is:Learn the successful business management from corporate university; follow the objective laws of human capital development and knowledge innovation, strengthen the ties with enterprise innovation practice; participate in the establishment of corporate universities union; and deepen college-enterprise cooperation; all above contribute to the innovation development of higher education especially the applied specialties of university.