Best Practices for Collaboration Between Industry and Academe

Academic institutions
Academic organizations seek funding, reputation and societal impact. Sustainable programs tied to the practice community attract high-quality students, which in turn brings more interest from prospective partners to collaborate. Student participants typically are offered employment in the partner organization, which elevates the reputation of the academic institution. Universities like displaying collaborative programs and societal impact in their messages to alumni and when reporting to legislatures. Secondary benefits are acquisition of facilities, networking and education quality.

Practitioners
Top priorities for practitioners are professional development, career promotion, and better ability to hire qualified personnel. Professional development includes access to new ideas, technological surveillance, refreshers on theoretical fundamentals, engagement in fundamental research, and peer benchmarking. Incentives also include personal satisfaction as a mentor, attending conferences, publishing in scientific journals, and an opportunity to influence the education of the next generation.

Collaborative projects with academia also provide an opportunity to train and evaluate potential employees before extending a job offer. In addition, student allegiance to the corporate collaborator is a recruiting advantage for students who are familiar with the technologies and practices of the corporation.

Practice entity
Top incentives for industrial companies and other practice entities are new ideas, new product/process development, access to new knowledge, recruiting, and brand-name recognition. Even if the involved students accept employment elsewhere, they might have a preference to use a collaborator’s product there, and their in-school affirmation of the experience will aid the sponsor’s recruitment of other students.

Companies may view collaborations with academia as low-cost research and development initiatives, or as investments in workforce development. The benefit-to-cost ratio is often enhanced when government funding also supports the initiative. Demonstrating societal responsibility is another motivator, achieved by helping and stimulating academia to focus on real-world problems and opportunities.

Ensuring collaboration success

Collaboration is not a one-sided game. An erroneous industry view is that a company hires the academic to develop a solution, the same way it might hire a consultant. An erroneous academic view is to take the position and the money and run (in pursuit of scientific publication). Notably, people may claim their academic-practice partnership is a collaboration, but in a collaboration the individuals share, are flexible, and accept each other’s perspectives.

Mutually beneficial collaboration requires all players to understand how the others perceive the initiative, and to help provide what the others will interpret as a win. It may require each player to give up on getting its primary “win” and to settle for a secondary benefit, so that other players also can experience a win. For example, faculty may primarily want to use industrial funding to support mathematical analysis and journal publications. This provides little value to an industrial sponsor. It is acceptable to pursue and publish mathematical analysis, but also seek to return the sponsor’s interpretation of benefit.

As another example, industry may primarily want, in return for a bit of funding support for a student, to be able to claim all rights to the lifetime of knowledge that the faculty advisor has acquired. Alternately, industry should accept the workforce development benefit of their contribution. Success requires each entity to find a way to shape the process and outcomes to satisfy their values, while making it satisfactory to the other entity. To create a win-win (actually win-to-the-5th-power) means that the process and outcomes that generate success for all may be suboptimal for any one entity. Industry practitioners are familiar with this condition of suboptimally operating one process unit to maximize manufacturing.

Collaboration also means mutual respect for the viewpoints and experience that the other has acquired. Having acquired career success, key individuals on either side of the gap are strongly immersed in their way of doing things. They have their own terminology, symbology, values, and conventions and often do not understand the other’s situation, ways and needs.