IR4.0? Academia should stop knee jerk reactions to latest buzzwords.

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There is an exciting debate spurred by the appointment of Nadiem, the Go-Jek founder to the post of a Minister in Indonesia. In one speech by a Malaysian leader, his success was attributed to him being IR4.0 ready. And the ripple effect created within Malaysian academia is that this shows the importance of universities to produce IR4.0 ready graduates.I disagree. 

Nadiem is a product of Harvard MBA program. Maybe the key is to look at what Harvard nurtured him to be. Harvard is not known for ICT or IR4.0 stuff. But it prepared Nadiem for something bigger. Nadiem did not invent any of the IR4.0 stuff, he just used it to create Go-Jek. We never hear Harvard or any US universities shouting about IR4.0. It is a mere buzzword so often talked about in Malaysia. 

With Nadiem Harvard education,  if we were to surmise its philosophy, it was not about industry skills, it was about creativity and strategic thinking skills. Harvard produce creative and bold innovators.

This is why I find the repeated calls towards IR4.0 and IR-n soon is a bit disconcerting. Perhaps we should pre-empt this phenomenon by focusing on producing graduates who are IR-n Proof? If we focus too much on adjusting to IR4.0 now, what would happen when IR5.0 come? And then IR6.0 and so on. Universities are big ships, huge organisations. It takes years to steer Malaysian universities from being vocational factories in the 70s to research factories in the 90s, and then years to steer them towards producing innovations, then yet again years to steer them towards commercialisation. Suddenly there's IR4.0 and we are not doing enough. Do we always have to do these steering every so often? by the time the big ship finally steered towards IR4.0, the destination would have shifted somewhere else. What if instead of steering the big ship, we produce agile and quick thinking sailors who can navigate the waters with their own small ships as the world need it? The sailors are our graduates. Come IR-X they will accept the challenge and They will brave the storm. this would not happen if we keep producing graduates with old templates.
 One way to do this, let our students spend more time with industry, where they learn the latest trick of the trade. they come to us just to learn PERSPECTIVES. Holistic view of humanities, its depth and quirkiness, feel for the era. I found microcredential begin to make sense if we think about gaining industrial skill. They learn by working with the industry. we, the academicians can only pretend we are the latest trend in the industry. We are not.
Another reason they come to us is to learn the fundamentals, upon which they can expand and expound. Thats it. Cutting edge fundamental research is still necessary to explore new frontiers. This is what we do. Not to prepare them for industry or IR-x.

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