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It’s Not Just for Engineers — How Non-STEM Lecturers Win Through ISM

When a fintech company submits an RfP to BINUS RTT asking for help reducing user drop-off in their onboarding flow, the team that gets selected is not going to be five software engineers. It will include a UX researcher, a behavioral economist, a communication specialist, and possibly a legal expert to advise on data consent design. The engineering problem is never purely engineering. This is true of almost every industry challenge that enters the ISM ecosystem — and it is the single most important thing non-STEM BINUS lecturers need to understand about why ISM is not someone else’s program.

The persistent assumption that technology transfer belongs to engineering, computer science, and the natural sciences is a structural misconception embedded in how most Indonesian universities have historically marketed their research ecosystems. It is also, increasingly, an inaccurate one. BINUS RTT’s ISM program explicitly names its model as multidisciplinary: the Bank of Industry Problems on BRIDGE: Opportunities contains challenges that span organizational transformation, regulatory navigation, market communication, financial modeling, and behavioral change — areas where faculty from the School of Business, the Faculty of Law, the Faculty of Communication, and the social sciences hold direct, relevant expertise.

This matters for a BINUS lecturer’s career in concrete terms. The Tri Dharma framework that governs your angka kredit does not restrict research collaboration to technical fields. External collaboration, joint publications, and recognized industry engagement contribute to your research and pengabdian scores regardless of your discipline. A communication lecturer who leads a market research team on behalf of an ISM engagement — producing a business model document, a consumer insight report, and a joint publication — generates exactly the same category of recognized output as an engineer who builds a prototype. The mechanism is the same; only the content differs.

There are two ways non-STEM lecturers typically enter the ISM ecosystem effectively. The first is as team leads on RfPs where the core problem is within their domain — market entry strategy, organizational culture assessment, regulatory compliance roadmap, community impact measurement. These RfPs exist in the Bank of Industry Problems and tend to be undersubscribed because most lecturers who see the board assume it is for scientists. The second, and perhaps more powerful, is as a deliberately recruited member of a multidisciplinary team responding to a technical RfP. A software product team that doesn’t understand its users’ communication preferences or legal obligations is a team with predictable gaps — and industry partners who have worked with universities before know this.

An instructive regional example comes from Singapore Management University (SMU), which has embedded a formal “Business + Technology” research matching protocol since 2019, where every technical industry problem submitted to its research office is simultaneously reviewed by faculty from its business and law schools for co-investigator relevance. By 2023, SMU reported that over 40% of its active industry collaboration agreements involved co-investigators from non-technical faculties (SMU Research Office, 2023 Annual Report). The logic is simple: industry problems are multidisciplinary, so the teams that solve them should be too.

At BINUS, the Youngpreneur program — which places students as business development partners on lecturer research projects — is already built on exactly this logic. A student from a business faculty working on market research for a technical research product is not a workaround; it is the intended design. Non-STEM lecturers who supervise or co-supervise Youngpreneur participants are embedded in the ISM pipeline whether they realize it or not.

The practical action is to stop waiting for an RfP that looks like a paper you could have written. Browse BRIDGE: Opportunities with the question “what kind of expertise does this problem actually require?” rather than “is this my field?” Attend an ISM Day to meet the industry partners directly and understand what they’re looking for in a team. And reach out to RTT to flag your research competencies — building the list of potential partners is something the team actively maintains, and non-STEM expertise is deliberately sought.

Every discipline has a role in making a research product reach the market. For a full explanation of how BINUS’s industry matching ecosystem works across all faculties, visit the Industry Partnership & Solution Matching page on BINUS RTT.

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