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In a recent meeting with a high-level administrator from a partner institution reviewing our ongoing partnership, we had just finished reviewing the success in student exchanges, Faculty Led programs, and overall student and faculty mobility. Our guest asked how many of these admittedly great interactions had produced research collaborations or some research product. The sobering reality was that essentially no important research outcomes had come from all these interactions. The silver lining is that the partner institution understood this was an issue whose roots stemmed from both institution’s insufficient focus on this matter and was eager to turn the answer around with our next set of choices and actions. But this interaction highlighted the direction that our current strategic planning must consider: research and innovation as fundamental outcomes to our institutional activities.

As we have mentioned multiple times already, for us to have the impact on Mexico and the world that our mission statement requires, we must radically transform our relationship to innovation. [1] [2] [3] The recent interaction mentioned above highlights how we are in a position to invest in our international relationships with a renewed focus on transformative innovation with a global impact.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) for 2017-2018 ranks Mexico a middling 51^st among 137 economies (37^th percentile). [4] Among the top 10 problematic factors for doing business in Mexico it is very interesting to note that the majority are areguably important impediments to a culture of innovation: Corruption (#1), Inefficient government bureaucracy (#3), Tax regulations (#5), Access to financing (#6), Inadequately educated workforce (#8), Policy Instability (#9), and Insufficient Capacity to Innovate (#10). The two worst-performing pillars of the 12 that conform the Competitiveness Index were Institutions and Innovation.

The GCI highlights that the greatest opportunities for growth in Mexico are in transforming our institutional and innovation landscapes. [4] As we begin our academic and administrative tasks this year we need to take a hard look at our institutional priorities and make tangible commitments to this transformational work. Beyond the stagnant, inefficient, and ineffectual indicators such as membership in the SNI or the number of papers published, we must set goals that will have a real and important impact upon our society. We must set research financing as a major priority by committing real growth to these budgets with a long-term commitment to internationally-relevant percentages of our overall budget. We must align our research incentives to these goals. Faculty who bring research financing and funded projects must be valued and rewareded as much as faculty who publish and get into the SNI.

UPAEP has done amazing things for Mexico already. CONACyT requires flexibility in graduate programs that enter the PNPC as a result of the groundbreaking work that UPAEP did fifteen years ago. UPAEP has attracted the largest share of federal graduate student scholarships for a private institution. Groundbreaking projects such as the CubeSat project are giving the University important research “firsts” in the country. UPAEP has won international competitions in business innovation and analysis such as the Microeconomics on Competitiveness international competition at Harvard. The list goes on, but the lessons remain the same. When the UPAEP commits to bold and fearless leadership and transformation, the results have been incredible. With this new year may our renewed commitment be to bold, fearless, transformative, and disruptive innovation. Let’s make the next 15 years exponentially more effective given our strong start of the last 15 years.

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Dr. Juan Manuel López Oglesby, Director, Graduate Biomedical Engineering Sciences UPAEP

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