I was invited as a speaker and advisor to a summit at Purdue University two weeks ago. The meeting was created to discuss how cross-department acoustics researchers at the university can collaborate on new ideas, create a new interdisciplinary research center, and develop corporate partnerships. I was the industry-researcher representative, and I spent a considerable amount of time talking about how the different departments can collaborate under a single research concept.
What I didn’t get a chance to talk about was what university researchers need to understand to better collaborate with industry sponsors. So, over a series of posts I will discuss a few ideas on this topic.
Academia is increasingly turning to companies for research funding as federal funds become harder to get. The University of California has developed a matching-fund program that generates $50 million in corporate-sponsored research each year. In this post, I’ll discuss some of the issues that a university researcher must deal with in order to have a successful partnership with industry.
1. General Relativity
Time moves at a different pace on a university campus than on a corporate park: academia seemingly travels near the speed of light because what seems like a short duration to them can seem like a lifetime to industry. The university research process allows researchers to contemplate problems deeply and discover patterns of thought that had been previously undiscovered. A couple of months is nearly a blink of an eye to a university research program.
Time literally is money in industry, however, and a week lost in contemplative thought is a week lost in revenue. When R&D departments solve problems, they are not searching for the ultimate truth but for the best approach that can be developed given their time and resource constraints, knowing that there’s always time for improvements later. University researchers are driven by “Why and how?”; R&D engineers are driven by “Make it work.” Both sides of an industry-university partnership need to be aware of the relativity of their perspectives on the passage of time. Otherwise, “frequent updates” by university researchers might be viewed as abusive negligence by the company.
2. Training Day
Part of a university’s function is to educate students, both in classrooms and in laboratories. Research labs consist of students and post-docs doing most of the heavy lifting so that they can learn the research disciplines of their own field and become experts on their topic of investigation. This, of course, means that those doing industry-sponsored research are spending a lot of time simply learning their craft. Which takes time. Which means you need to consider point #1. Post-docs, though, usually are already experts in their field and are more effective time-wise: less time spent learning, quicker at conducting the research. Corporate sponsors need to understand who will be doing the sponsored research—graduate students or post-docs—and what that means for expected time-lines.
3. Publish or Perish
A researcher in academia is judged by their list of publications. Companies typically want to keep new ideas proprietary to obtain a competitive edge. You can see the potential for conflict. University researchers will want to, and should be able to, publish the research that is being funded—otherwise they won’t maintain their grants and possibly their positions. This issue should be addressed up front and guidelines provided to allow companies to apply for a patent before any inventions are revealed in publications or presentations. If a company doesn’t want anything published, they shouldn’t fund university research.
4. Know Your Client
University researchers focus on proving hypotheses and developing new theories—they typically don’t know much about the practical aspects of a potential corporate sponsor’s applications or their customers. Why should they care? Well, this presents a problem when looking for a common bond between industry and academia to justify a partnership. If you don’t know anything about dancing, don’t expect to be asked onto the dance floor too often.
The National Institute of Health is currently trying to promote a Translational Research initiative, defined as bringing results from the lone researcher into the clinic and to the patient, i.e., provide an application to basic research. This involves clinicians collaborating with basic scientists and each understanding the other’s world. A similar level of understanding is necessary between the academic researcher and the corporate sponsor. If the researcher doesn’t understand the application, their research is less likely to be of value to the sponsor because of the unlikeliness of it translating successfully.
Industry-types are often suspicious of the usefulness of academia to their business, and university researchers need to propose ideas that demonstrate an understanding of the issues facing the sponsor’s industry. University researchers looking to create partnerships with companies need to spend some time understanding problems that companies have with their technology and their customers’ needs—find the areas of opportunity where university research overlaps with industry need. This produces the highest likelihood of a company being interested in sponsoring research and and of that research ultimately being useful to the sponsor.
5. Ownership
The area of intellectual property is such a quagmire these days and such an important part of university-industry relations that I think I’ll give this topic its own post some time soon. Sorry.
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