237year 2008. This initiative was based on the Singapore government’s intention to turn
Singapore into the “Boston of the East” modelling after Harvard University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Global Schoolhouse, which is not only
an education policy but also a population and immigration policy to draw in foreign
talents and students (Ng 2013 ; Tan 2006 ), has an implication to transform education,
in particular higher education, as an export service industry to boost the reputation
of Singapore as a global education hub in Asia and to generate national incomes for
the city-state. Through various forms of linkages and partnerships formed between
local publicly funded bedrock universities and branding world-class universities
from overseas, it was expected that Singapore could be developed as a “global
knowledge hub” dedicated to new knowledge production and innovation, R&D
activities and also university-industry linkages (Olds 2007 ), even though the Global
Schoolhouse project is not without setbacks as seen from both failed alliances with
Johns Hopkins University from the United States and also the University of New
South Wales from Australia (Sidhu 2009a), together with the relocation of the
Chicago Business School’s Asia campus from Singapore to Hong Kong since 2014.
Entrepreneurialization
More recently, higher education research has focused more on the entrepreneurial-
ization, which is interpreted as the ways higher education institutions add a more
entrepreneurial aspect to their research and educational activities such as the com-
mercialization of knowledge and research and the cultivation of entrepreneurial
spirit among graduates (Ho et al. 2010 ). Another perspective concerns about
university- industry linkage as well as university-enterprise cooperation in Singapore.
As Mok ( 2015 ) observes, higher education is the main driving force to promote the
development of knowledge economy. As a consequence, the interaction between the
state, universities and industries would be strengthened further. In Singapore, the
government as a major financier of R&D and scientific research, as what has been
mentioned earlier, plays a leading role in facilitating cooperation between universi-
ties and enterprises. The development of an “entrepreneurial university model” is
aimed to make higher education institutions to shoulder more responsibilities and
make more contributions to the local economy with the government’s proactive role
in providing infrastructure and financial resources as well as forging strategic coop-
eration and alliances between local higher education institutions and multinational
corporations. In this sense, higher education is more closely affiliated with the pol-
icy of economic development and technological innovation as a vital component for
the ongoing economic restructuring policy, which has been complemented by
knowledge innovation and commercialization and the recruitment of more foreign
talents (Wong et al. 2007 ).
In summary, this section has provided a review of major higher education
research literature since the mid-1980s, from which a few themes and issues related
to the development of higher education in Singapore have been synthesized. These
13 Researching Higher Education in “Asia’s Global Education Hub”: Major Themes...