Best Practices for Collaboration Between Industry and Academe

 an activity whereby individuals work together for a common purpose to achieve a common target benefit. Essential skills include trust, tolerance, self-awareness, empathy, transparency, active listening, and conflict resolution. Collaboration is not people working independently and following their own path. Contrasting collaboration, many respondents provided comments that characterize one group as lacking respect for the skills and ability or the other. Comments accused people from both sides as having an inability to collaborate. Collaboration means accepting the experience of the others in the joint effort. This might be a difficult message for many experts to accept.

Bridge: one player understands the “way” and constraints and needs of the other community and can adapt to bridge the culture, methodology, time and expertise gaps.

Director: a person who understands both sides of the gap and can get people on either side to do the necessary work and engage in a manner to satisfy the other. The director continually interacts with high levels in the funding organization to keep it committed and satisfied, and also interacts with the faculty researchers to ensure they are on track to return benefit to the sponsor.

Competencies: all the needed and complementary skills and experience. This includes market analysis, legal constraints, implementation economics, implementation context, as well as the academic competencies in mathematical analysis, data analysis, etc. Success on one side of the gap may dupe people into thinking they have strong competencies. But, often, they do not know what they do not know. They need those on the other side of the gap to reveal what is missing.

Commitment: participants in each of the five groups want to see the initiative generate desired win-win results. Organizations provide the personal time and funding and resources needed by the others to make the project work. Organizations provide the reward for participation effectiveness by employees.

Concrete: goals, methods, timing and funding are clearly defined. It means that all parties buy in to the details of the project.

Communication: all parties keep the others informed of progress and issues. Faculty members are used to working in isolation for years on a project and adapting progress to their own goals, which change as experience reveals publishing opportunities. When they do report progress, it could be a major bureaucratic burden (full reports, IP protection, etc.). Communication within the practice-academic collaboration should be informal to make the frequent updates a minor burden. Also, communication skill is important, which means that the academic addresses the project management issues to the practice partner (not glorying in a bunch of theory) by providing results and indicating clear progress along the timelines and milestones. And the practice partner needs to patiently accept the theory when the academic presents it. Perhaps it will be useful. Communication should be frequent, easy, and address what is important to the others.

Practice: all professionals who practice automation and control, regardless of their place of work. The practice is not limited to industry. There are many control practitioners who are part of nonprofit, government, military, and even academic organizations. Accordingly, we have replaced the commonly used expression “university-industry” with the more inclusive “academic-practice” or “practice-academe.”

Key survey findings

The following tables list the attributes of the program and of the participants that are essential for success of each. Our analysis combined these results into “Top 10 ways to improve collaboration” (Figure 2).


Table 1: Attributes of the program that are essential for success for academe
Although there were many in the survey, these top four items comprise 50 percent of the count.


Table 2: Attributes of the participants that are essential for success for academe
These top two attributes comprise more than 50 percent of the count.


Table 3: Attributes of the program that are essential for success for the practice
These the top three attributes comprise more than 50 percent of the count.


Table 4: Attributes of the participants that are essential for success for the practice
The list of attributes of the participants that are essential for success of the practice is quite small; the top single item comprised 46 percent of the count—very important.


Table 5: Aspects that are essential for collaboration success
These top four represent 50 percent of the total count.


Table 6: Aspects that are a barrier to collaboration success 
 

Further reading

Evidence of the practice-academic gap in understanding is represented by the following articles. Some are academic analysis of the literature of collaboration case studies. They focus on discovering truth and present it in a sophisticated (high fog index) style, with secondary importance about what to do and not do for application success. Others seek to understand the problems and focus on what to do to overcome the gap.