Beyond Physical Buildings: Why Indonesia's Next Institutional Challenge Is Capacity Building

Over the past two decades, Indonesia has become remarkably good at building. Universities have added new faculties and taller campus towers. Hospitals have expanded their wings and their networks. Research foundations have opened new laboratories. Religious and philanthropic organizations have grown their institutional footprints across provinces, sometimes across the archipelago. Corporations have built new facilities and distribution networks. By almost any physical measure, Indonesian institutions have grown.

This is real progress, and it deserves to be recognized as such. Physical infrastructure is not easy to build. It requires capital, patience, governance, and long-term commitment — qualities that many Indonesian institutions have demonstrated at scale.

But growth of this kind tends to raise a quieter question, one that surfaces only after the ribbon-cutting ceremonies are over: what happens after the buildings are built?

A building, in the end, is a container. It creates the physical conditions for things to happen — teaching, research, treatment, production, worship, service. But what actually happens inside it, and between it and other buildings in the same network, depends on something less visible: the people, the systems, the culture, and the relationships that occupy that space.

Physical Building and Capacity Building Are Not Opposites

It would be a mistake to read this as an argument against physical development, or as a claim that Indonesian institutions have over-invested in buildings and under-invested in people. That is not the argument here. Physical building and capacity building are not opposing choices — they are simultaneous and complementary ones, better pursued side by side than treated as one following the other.

Physical building tends to ask a certain set of questions: What facilities do we need? How many buildings can we construct? How large can the institution become? What infrastructure should we provide for the people we serve?

Capacity building asks a different, and in some ways more difficult, set of questions: What capabilities should grow inside the institution? How do we develop people and leadership? How do we strengthen the quality of research? How do we connect expertise across departments, faculties, or business units that were built at different times, for different purposes? How do we transform knowledge into solutions, and collaboration into results?

Neither set of questions is more important than the other, and in practice the two are best pursued at the same time rather than one after another — an institution's capacity does not need to wait until its buildings are finished to begin developing.

The next stage of development is not less infrastructure. It is better activation of the infrastructure that already exists.

Why Assets Do Not Automatically Create Impact

Here lies a pattern worth examining honestly, though carefully. Having many campuses, many laboratories, many qualified faculty members, many students, and many physical assets does not automatically translate into strong research output, breakthrough innovation, successful commercialization, meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration, or measurable community impact.

Between institutional resources and institutional impact sits what might be called a translation gap:

Yet the more consequential issue is often not simply that expertise works in isolation. It is a question of scope, depth, and quality — what is actually attempted, how far it is carried, and how rigorously it is done. A research question can be pursued at a preliminary level, or carried through to a point where it is genuinely ready to inform policy, stand up in a serious publication, or become a working product. Two projects sharing the same title and a similar budget can end up at very different points along that spectrum, and that difference often matters more than whether the work involved collaboration at all.

Collaboration helps, but it is not sufficient on its own. An institution can have hundreds of qualified researchers and still find that their expertise operates in separate silos, each working within its own department without a clear channel to collaborate across disciplines. It can have research output that is academically rigorous yet largely stops at publication, without a pathway to implementation or commercialization. It can have real-world problems in its surrounding community or industry, and real expertise sitting a few buildings away, with no mechanism connecting the two.

Collaboration of this kind also depends on conditions that are harder to build than a partnership agreement. One of the more persistent challenges in Indonesia's research and innovation landscape is not, at the outset, a shortage of good ideas — it is sustaining an effort long enough, and consistently enough, for it to mature into something that genuinely changes the conversation: a piece of writing that contributes to a field or to policy, or a product that reaches and serves people at scale. Many promising initiatives lose momentum well before that point, not for lack of talent, but for lack of continuity.

A related tension that surfaces often in Indonesia is the recurring debate over which matters more — basic, foundational science, or applied research aimed at downstream commercialization (hilirisasi). Framed as a choice between the two, the debate tends to be unproductive. Basic and applied research occupy different, equally legitimate spaces along the same continuum; in a mature research ecosystem, they function less as rivals than as a connected, ongoing series — fundamental inquiry that expands what is understood, and applied work that carries some of that understanding toward use. Treating them as opposing camps risks starving one to feed the other, when the more useful question is how a pipeline connects them over time.

This connects to a common misunderstanding about what a single researcher is expected to do. It is often assumed that a strong researcher should be able to carry a project the entire distance — publishing rigorously and also turning the work into a marketable product. That expectation does not reflect how these domains actually function; by nature, foundational research and applied development call for different skills, incentives, and timelines. A researcher does not need to become an entrepreneur to be considered successful, and a team built for downstream translation does not need to originate every fundamental insight it applies. What matters is a clear direction and a functioning handoff — theoretical and applied work each with a defined role, connected through collaboration rather than compressed into a single person or team.

It is worth being precise about what this pattern is not. It is not evidence that Indonesian institutions lack talent — Indonesia has a large and growing base of qualified researchers, professionals, and institutions.

These are not signs of institutional failure. They are common challenges that emerge when institutions grow faster than the systems designed to connect their capabilities — a pattern observed in large, fast-growing institutional networks around the world, not only in Indonesia.

Three questions may matter more than the volume of funding or the number of institutions involved: What quality can the work reach? How far — through what stages — can it be carried? And can the effort be sustained long enough to compound into real impact?

The Capacity Multiplier

One useful way to think about institutional development is as a sequence of phases, each building on the one before it.

In the expansion phase, an institution focuses on building physical infrastructure, organizational structure, campuses, facilities, and operating systems. This is where much of Indonesia's institutional development has concentrated over the past two decades, and the results are visible nationwide.

In the activation phase, an institution begins asking a different set of questions: How can all of these assets work together? How can expertise scattered across departments be connected? How can research be oriented toward real problems? How can students be meaningfully involved in innovation, rather than only in coursework? How can a university, hospital network, or foundation function as a problem-solving institution rather than only a service-delivery one? How can knowledge become economic and social value?

In the multiplication phase, the capacity that has been built begins to compound. Stronger research leads to better collaboration; better collaboration produces innovation pipelines; innovation pipelines create industry partnerships, new products, community solutions, and — over time — new talent and institutional reputation that reinforce the cycle.

Many Indonesian institutions already have deep strength in the first phase. The opportunity ahead lies in strengthening the second and third.

A New Opportunity for Large Institutional Networks

Large institutional networks illustrate this opportunity particularly well, precisely because they have already done the hard work of expansion.

Muhammadiyah offers a useful, and genuinely admirable, illustration. Few organizations anywhere in the world have built an institutional network of comparable scale from within civil society: over 160 universities and colleges,^[1] along with an extensive network of hospitals and other Amal Usaha (charitable enterprises) spanning education, healthcare, and social services across the country. That scale, sustained over more than a century, represents a national asset that few countries possess in this form.

Muhammadiyah's own recent steps suggest that its leadership is already thinking in exactly these terms — not starting capacity building from zero, but strengthening, connecting, and scaling what already exists. In February 2026, the Majelis Pendidikan Tinggi, Penelitian dan Pengembangan (Diktilitbang) of Muhammadiyah's central leadership and Indonesia's Education Fund Management Institution (LPDP) launched a collaborative research funding scheme called RISPRO Invitasi Berkemajuan — the first program of its kind between LPDP and a civil-society organization.^[2] The scheme pooled Rp20 billion in research funding, with Rp10 billion contributed by each party, and selected 26 research proposals out of 187 submitted, drawn primarily from Muhammadiyah and 'Aisyiyah universities (PTMA) as well as several other institutions, including Universitas Indonesia.^[3] The funded research spans five strategic themes — food security and agriculture, energy transition and manufacturing, health, digital engineering, and social-economic-humanities research — with an explicit focus on hilirisasi, the downstream translation of research into implementation across Muhammadiyah's network of hospitals, schools, and farmer cooperatives.^[4]

A fair question worth raising, in the same appreciative spirit, concerns scale relative to ambition. Rp20 billion is a substantial figure in absolute terms, and it would go a considerable distance if concentrated on a small number of studies carried over a longer horizon — five years or more, for example. Divided among 26 selected proposals out of 187 submitted, however, the funding per project becomes comparatively modest, which raises a reasonable question: what depth of output can realistically be expected from that level of support, and over what timeframe? The more useful benchmarks for a program of this kind may be less about the headline figure and more about three things — the quality the funded work is able to reach, how far each project is carried, from concept, to validated finding, to something ready for use, and whether the effort continues long enough, across cycles, to compound into something larger than any single grant. It is also worth asking whether the supporting infrastructure — laboratories, testing facilities, and other state-of-the-art capabilities — already exists to carry ambitious ideas through, or whether that, too, needs to be accessed through partnership with other institutions. Partnerships of that kind inevitably come with constraints, but they can still allow a genuinely ambitious idea to move forward, provided the effort behind it remains consistent rather than a single, one-off cycle.

This is a meaningful signal. It suggests that the more relevant question for an organization like Muhammadiyah is not whether it has capacity — it clearly does — but how existing capacity, spread across a very large network, can be connected, strengthened, and translated into greater collective impact.

When an institution already has the infrastructure, the network, and the people, the next multiplier may come from how effectively those resources are connected and activated.

Hidayatullah offers a second, equally instructive illustration of the same opportunity, built through a different institutional model. Founded in Balikpapan in 1973, Hidayatullah has grown into a nationwide network of more than 600 pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) spread across over 100 districts, coordinated through 38 provincial boards.^[6] Its network spans the full education pathway, from early-childhood and primary education through secondary schools and several institutions of higher learning, alongside a dedicated philanthropic arm, Baitul Maal Hidayatullah, and a healthcare initiative, Islamic Medical Service.^[7] Like Muhammadiyah, Hidayatullah has already done the demanding work of expansion — building a distributed institutional footprint that reaches communities other institutions often find hard to serve. The opportunity for a network of this kind lies less in adding new sites than in strengthening the connective tissue between them: shared curricula and research on effective community education, coordinated health and social-welfare programs across branches, and structured pathways for its higher-education institutions to collaborate with universities, researchers, and industry elsewhere in the country.

None of this is unique to religious organizations. The same opportunity applies to education foundations, private university groups, hospital networks, corporations, government institutions, and philanthropic organizations across Indonesia.

The larger the institutional network, the greater the potential multiplier effect of capacity building.

If a single individual strengthens their capability, the effect is meaningful but bounded. If a system of dozens or hundreds of institutions, thousands of professionals and researchers, and hundreds of thousands of students strengthens its ability to connect and collaborate, the effect can become exponential.

Beyond Training: What Capacity Building Can Actually Mean

It is worth pausing on what "capacity building" should mean in this context, because the term is often reduced to a single seminar or a short workshop. A more useful definition treats capacity building as the systematic development of an institution's ability to solve increasingly complex problems — and that development happens across several layers at once.

• Individual capacity — strengthening the capabilities of researchers, lecturers, professionals, managers, and students.
• Team capacity — building interdisciplinary teams, research groups, project teams, and innovation teams that did not previously exist or did not previously work together.
• Institutional capacity — strengthening research systems, collaboration mechanisms, innovation governance, knowledge management, technology transfer, and decision-making processes.
• Ecosystem capacity — connecting universities, industry, government, investors, communities, and international experts into a functioning network rather than a set of parallel, disconnected relationships.

The strongest institutions may not necessarily be those with the most resources, but those that can connect their resources most effectively.

From Capacity to Collaboration

Building this kind of connective capacity is rarely something an institution needs to do entirely alone, and it does not need to start from scratch. This is where platforms designed specifically to bridge scientific expertise, institutions, and real-world problems can play a useful, supporting role.

SciencePreneur, an Indonesian sciencepreneurship platform, is one example of this kind of platform — not as an authority instructing large organizations on how they should develop, but as a collaborative partner that helps institutions access expertise, connect capabilities, and translate scientific knowledge into real-world impact.^[5] Built on a foundation of scientific expertise and consultation, research commercialization, knowledge and training, collaborative research, community and sustainability initiatives, and a science-based marketplace, SciencePreneur's role sits at the connective layer that large institutions often find hardest to build internally.

What Collaboration Could Look Like

In practical terms, this kind of collaboration could take several forms.

• Institutional Science Capacity Mapping — helping an institution map the expertise, research strengths, facilities, and collaboration opportunities it already has — not to identify shortcomings, but to make invisible capabilities visible and connect them to opportunities.
• Problem-Based Capacity Building — capacity building organized around a real institutional challenge — for example, a university seeking to strengthen research downstreaming, from mapping its research portfolio to preparing a commercialization pathway.
• Expert Matching and Collaborative Projects — connecting institutional challenges with relevant scientific expertise through a structured pathway: Institutional Challenge → Expert Matching → Collaborative Project → Capacity Transfer → Sustainable Internal Capability.
• Research-to-Impact Programs — helping researchers identify real-world problems, validate research applications, build interdisciplinary teams, and connect with industry partners.
• Science Leadership and Innovation Programs — building the practical capabilities of research leaders, university leaders, laboratory managers, and young researchers to identify problems, manage innovation, and communicate science in ways that create institutional impact.
• Collaborative Science Challenges — bringing institutions, researchers, students, industry, and communities together around a shared real-world problem — moving from problem to collaborative research to pilot solution to measurable impact.

The objective of capacity building, in every one of these models, should be to leave stronger capabilities inside the institution — not to create ongoing dependency on external consultants.

Conclusion

Indonesia does not have to start every stage of institutional development from zero. Many of its universities, hospitals, foundations, religious organizations, and companies already have what most developing institutions spend decades trying to build: people, infrastructure, networks, knowledge, and assets. The question ahead is not how to acquire more of these things, but how to turn institutional assets into institutional capability, and institutional capability into societal impact.

Perhaps the next chapter of institutional development in Indonesia is not about building more places for people to work. It is about building stronger ways for people, knowledge, and institutions to work together.

The buildings have created the space. The next challenge is to build the capability that can fill that space with ideas, collaboration, innovation, and impact.