Underpinning the ideal of the marketized smarter university is a complex mosaic of people, technologies, standards and policies, all of which are being brought into alignment as the social, political, technical and material substrate to the utopia of a big data-driven, marketized Higher Education sector.
In the agricultural sector, data-driven precision agriculture shows great potential in facilitating the increase in food production demanded by the increasing world population.
Consequently, claims Clark (2016): In ten years' time, it's possible to envisage a digital HE sector, with data-driven universities operating within a smart, connected environment.
In ten years' time, it's possible to envisage a digital HE sector, with data-driven universities operating within a smart, connected environment.
But Data Futures is also, as its chief executive has claimed, part of a utopian vision of 'a digital HE sector, with data-driven universities operating within a smart, connected environment,' where institutions can self-monitor, policymakers can analyse sectoral data, and users can measure their progress in real-time (Clark, 2016).
From the federal government's data-driven policing efforts to private sector initiatives to secure the supply chain, data has the potential to emerge as a powerful new tool in the fight against counterfeit goods.
Australia's strategy increased the deployment of data-driven solutions in the Australian public sector leading to initiatives like the Australian Taxation Office trawling through records to find evidence on the use of tax havens, and data matching to identify small online retailers that are not meeting their compliance obligations.
Europe has a great opportunity to use data-driven innovation to enhance the effectiveness of its public sector and the competitiveness of its private sector.
"In particular, the confluence of factors such as proximity to universities like UCL, Cambridge and Imperial; the strength of the fintech sector and global leadership of the local digital media & ad tech sectors means that the 'hard tech', data-driven software ventures targeted by the Open Ocean fund are in increasing abundance".
These software tools are in an important sense parts of the extrastatecraft of contemporary Higher Education infrastructure, acting as sociotechnical relays for the data-driven practices required by smarter universities in a marketized sector.
