For more than a decade, Pakistan’s higher education system has adopted the vocabulary of innovation with increasing fluency.
“Knowledge economy.” “Industry linkages.” “Commercialization pipelines.”
The language is modern. The system is not.
At the center of this architecture sits the Office of Research, Innovation, and Commercialization (ORIC), introduced by the Higher Education Commission (Higher Education Commission (HEC) Pakistan) to convert universities from degree-granting institutions into engines of applied research and economic transformation.
The premise was linear: research would move from publication to production, from journals to industry, from universities to markets.
The HEC’s ORIC Self-Assessment Evaluation Report 2024–25 suggests a different equilibrium has emerged.
Pakistan has built the administrative form of innovation. It has not built its economic function.
The system is active. It is not transformative.
1. Structural concentration without diffusion
Out of 95 universities evaluated, only seven reached the highest “W” category: NUST, NED University, Air University, IBA Sukkur, University of Agriculture Faisalabad, University of Lahore, and Ziauddin University.
These institutions are routinely cited as evidence of progress. But in system terms, they represent concentration without diffusion.
Excellence exists, but it does not propagate.
In mature innovation systems, top-tier universities function as nodes within dense networks of firms, capital, and applied research ecosystems. In China, leading universities are structurally embedded within state-directed industrial upgrading. In South Korea, university research is tightly coupled with export-driven conglomerates. In India, elite technical institutions increasingly operate within startup and defense-industrial ecosystems that absorb and scale research output.
Pakistan’s structure is different. High performance exists in isolation. The surrounding system does not amplify it.
When fewer than one in ten institutions meets a high benchmark for research commercialization, the constraint is not performance distribution. It is system architecture.
2. The stable middle and the normalization of non-translation
The more revealing pattern lies in the middle distribution: 38 universities in the “X” category and 43 in “Y”.
These institutions are not collapsing. They are functioning.
They submit reports. They host seminars. They maintain administrative ORIC structures. They comply with evaluation frameworks.
Yet they do not meaningfully translate research into economic or industrial outcomes.
This is the defining feature of the system: procedural stability without functional conversion.
Over time, such systems do not appear broken. They appear normal.
But normalization is not neutrality. It is a form of institutional drift in which compliance replaces consequence, and documentation replaces delivery.
The university becomes legible to the state but increasingly illegible to the economy.
3. The incentive distortion: when measurement becomes production
The report records 9,987 research proposals submitted in FY 2024–25, with only 12.5 percent approved.
Conventional interpretation frames this as demand constrained by fiscal limits.
A systems interpretation suggests something more structural.
Where academic promotion, institutional ranking, and professional legitimacy are tied to research output volume, institutions rationally optimize for production of proposals rather than production of solutions.
The result is not simply more research activity. It is a shift in the nature of research itself.
Activity becomes decoupled from applicability. Output becomes decoupled from absorption.
This is a classic case in institutional economics: when metrics become targets, they cease to function as measures.
In comparative systems, this distortion is partially corrected through external anchoring. In China and South Korea, research funding is increasingly tied to industrial strategy and commercialization pathways. In India, private-sector spillovers and venture ecosystems introduce alternative validation mechanisms outside academic reporting cycles.
Pakistan remains largely internally validated. The system measures itself.
4. Governance fragmentation: the missing function of ORIC leadership
Only 68.42 percent of universities employ full-time ORIC heads.
This is not an administrative detail. It is a structural signal.
ORICs are boundary institutions designed to connect academic production with industrial demand. Their function requires hybrid expertise: intellectual property governance, commercial negotiation, and external partnership design.
Yet in a significant share of institutions, ORIC leadership is assigned as an additional responsibility to senior academics already embedded in teaching and internal governance structures.
The consequence is predictable: commercialization becomes secondary to academic continuity.
In systems where technology transfer is central, this function is professionalized and externally oriented. In Pakistan, it remains internally absorbed.
The interface between university and industry is therefore not absent. It is underpowered.
5. The periphery constraint and uniform evaluation
The report identifies underperforming institutions, including Bacha Khan University Charsadda, University of Swat, and Karakoram International University.
These universities operate in structurally constrained environments with weaker industrial ecosystems and limited absorptive capacity.
However, they are evaluated through uniform benchmarks that assume comparable institutional starting conditions.
This produces a predictable outcome: structural disadvantage is translated into performance deficit.
In comparative policy design, this problem is typically addressed through differentiated mandates and region-specific innovation strategies. China’s provincial specialization model and India’s federal variation in institutional design both reflect attempts, imperfect but deliberate, to align evaluation with context.
Pakistan’s uniform framework, by contrast, flattens context into score.
6. The core divergence: reporting systems vs translation systems
Across all indicators, a consistent structural divergence emerges.
Pakistan’s higher education system has developed strong reporting capacity:
- documentation compliance
- procedural alignment
- administrative visibility
But it has not developed translation capacity:
- research-to-industry conversion
- commercialization pathways
- economic absorption of knowledge
This is the central institutional gap.
Not the absence of research.
The absence of conversion.
7. a system that functions without consequence
Pakistan’s universities are not inactive.
They are increasingly organized, increasingly documented, and increasingly evaluated.
But in a comparative perspective, they remain weakly coupled to the economic systems they are intended to serve.
The ORIC framework does not describe institutional failure. It describes institutional substitution: administrative systems standing in for innovation systems.
This is why the diagnosis is difficult to act upon. The system does not appear broken. It appears functional, and that is precisely the problem. Because in knowledge economies, performance is not defined by activity. It is defined by what that activity becomes outside the institution.
