The Real World

Yesterday I paid a visit to a manufacturing company in the West Midlands. I got to hear the story of how  they almost went to the wall in 2008. How they have diversified their interests to protect against over reliance on a single income stream, and how the commercial medical market is a strong earner, once you can get over the hurdles of approval. They have a mixture of modern production facilities that can produce millions of widgets per year, and very old hydraulic presses with manual operatives. Its not sexy work. But they are providing work for over a hundred people and they need to involve innovation to remian competitive with companies from eastern Europe and the far east.
We met at a workshop I was giving to introduce people  and businesses to photonic technology. It was this that led them to think if photonic approaches could offer a new way of tackling some of the problems they come across. Generally these problems involved metrology of some sort. Avoiding costly errors of production is crucial as small mistakes in a few items can have big consequences to their customers and end up costing them significant sums in compensation and wastage. Yet much of the checking is still done by people who will tend to make mistakes.
This company needs people to help with innovation but they cant recruit anywhere near the number of graduates they need, becasue as I said earlier its not sexy. In this manufacturing engineering they estimated there were 100 jobs for every 10 graduates, and a massive skill shortage. Having spent time there and walked around the factory, and observed the daily grind, I left thinking that all academics should be made to experience this. Firstly it would make them realise how lucky they are to work in an academic environment. Second it might help them to realise what is needed to translate their work done in a lab into a working product that someone else might use. Currently there is an enormous gulf between  someones concept of how an idea could be used and what is required to make it happen.
 

The Dowling Review

A few months ago I caught wind of the Dowling review which was intended to :

... help researchers to understand better the interests of industry and to facilitate the development of trusting relationships that will deliver broad-based benefits to the UK through linking the long-term strategic needs of business with the UK’s research capabilities. The review will consider the implications for the full spectrum of research disciplines and businesses of different sizes, types and sectors.

As someone who has been in both camps I thought I had something to offer to this, so I submitted my opinions on the matter in the form of evidence to the review. I include it here.

 

Building long term relationships.

Whilst I have little experience of partaking of long term relationships between industry and academia, I have plenty of experience of trying to build them. The principal building blocks of industry-academic (IA) relations are trust and money, particularly when the industrial party has no history of working with a university. There are large cultural differences to overcome. My experience is that many businesses believe the reason they exist is to produce profit and when that is under threat research is one of the first things to be cut. Universities in contrast live to research, it is their primary interest. Thus at a basic level industry and academia can be fundamentally misaligned. Industry can sometimes view research as an expensive distraction from the business of delivery. Academia can lose interest when the science finishes and the development starts. Building the necessary trust to overcome these preconceptions takes time. Both sides of the IA relationship need to see and appreciate that there is mutual benefit and leverage to be had by collaborating. Both sides need to understand the goals of the other – industry needs something practical it can use, academia needs something it can publish, both sides need money. The opportunities for collaborative funded research are the attractive force that brings both sides together. However this is often a marriage of convenience, arising out of opportunity rather than evolving naturally from pre existing interaction.  The fact that it happens is clearly a good thing, but it could be  more effective.

Trust is something easily lost when the motivations are wrong. It has been my experience that within industry you can be courted by academia for support for large programmes  with promises of involvement and oversight, only to be dumped when the programme is successfully won and treated like an embarrassing member of the family, grudgingly acknowledged but kept at arms length.  Some of the more prominent universities behave as though they have the right to do what they like and companies should be grateful just be associated with them. In contrast universities might get nervous that companies will suffer a lack of confidence, or  financial difficulty and pull out of a project before it completes.

Trust and alignment of project goals are crucial to IA relationships.

Barriers for Business.

Universities can be large, intimidating, diverse, politically  sensitive institutions. A small company wishing to engage with a university might struggle to know where to start, who is doing relevant research, who is appropriate and in some cases who speaks the same language. Most universities now have business development personnel who can help with this, but there is a need for internet based accessibility to make this process simpler. The subject of who is doing relevant research is related to the area of open access publications. Within industry that has security concerns or limited funds, access to published journals behind a pay wall was often a significant barrier to discovering what had been done and by whom. It can lead to wasted time and effort   repeating someone else’s work unknowingly. Happily this is an area that the government is addressing by applying pressure on universities to publish in open access journals where public funding has been used.

Another barrier for business is intellectual property. They often see that owning the IP is essential, sometimes overly prescriptively so that universities cannot agree. Academics can often mistakenly believe that patenting an idea prevents them from publishing , counts for little academic merit and hinders their career. Conversely universities   regularly overestimate the value of their IP not realising the large amount of investment that needs to go into developing a concept into a product. A fair and reasonable agreement needs to be found and not a little education about the benefits and value of IP.

Whilst there are schemes that can provide funding for collaborative research , often the business models of industrial companies get in the way of accessing this funding. I know of large companies who would not take on partially funded  work due to the internal difficulties involved in acquiring matched funding and getting internal signoff on such a project.  Other companies have internal process difficulties that make adapting those processes overly difficult when taking on something new i.e. I have seen problems with senior financial people coming to terms with the processes involved in setting up these investigative collaborations when there is no product sold at the end of it. I have also seen problems when research collaborations cross financial year boundaries due to an unwillingness   to commit – this would have to be justified to senior management. In fairness this is a problem that faces the larger companies that have internal divisions and sections ( I have known one major company whose own internal research division approached me in a separate company wanting to know if we would be interested in their research output because it was too difficult to get their work taken up by their own company)

Barriers for Academia

The problems for academia are principally cultural in nature. There is an inherent elitism which looks down on applied science –a  subject addressed by the outgoing president of the institute of Physics Frances Saunders last year at the Photon 14 conference. Academia likes to focus on the science not the application. This is not altogether a bad thing as universities (particularly physical sciences) can use their resources to tackle generic problems, but  there is a need for intermediaries who can short cut the iterations of re-development needed in translating science to product. Staffing models with academia are a significant source of misalignment. The expert academic, the link to the company,  is rarely the person who does the work. Universities recruit people to work on specific projects , this recruitment process takes time and also requires a significant amount of training to get the new recruit up to speed. When this is a research student then their priority is their thesis not the companies product.  Companies often require a timescale that is shorter than PhD timescales , bespoke developments can move quickly and can often be influenced by market conditions. Universities do not respond quickly because they have a lack of redistributable staff.

Effectiveness of incentives

There are certainly good incentives available for IA relations. Academia usually gets fully funded and gets very important leverage with regard to ‘Impact’ , which is becoming a very significant metric. Industry gets partial funding, access to people and resources that might otherwise be impossible, and significant tax benefits for taking part in research. The tax benefits are such that the company can in principle receive more in tax rebate than they actually spend so the net benefits are considerable. Recouping these benefits can take several years which might cause some concern with cashflow. My perception is that there is general ignorance about the benefits of collaborative IA research  among many companies. Not all, some make it a fundamental part of their business model to get partially funded collaborative projects for developing their next generation of offerings (ARM). Bringing in new people with new minds can challenge existing ways of thinking and can be uncomfortable unless supported by external funds and commitments. But it is usually   an enlightening process. There is then a need to clearly state the benefits  - to finance, personnel and process that can be gained through IA collaboration. 

In short I think the incentives are good, just not well appreciated.

Stimulating collaboration with strategy

The government, through the EPSRC has sought to force universities to produce economic ‘impact’ in their funded research by producing ‘evidence’ at the proposal assessment stage of how the work will generate impact in wider society. This has led to friction in some instances where blue sky research is considered a worthy task in its own right and it is for others (often years later) to comprehend the impact.   Unfortunately this has not really had the desired effect. Academics seek out companies to support their proposals out of duty rather than aligned interest, because impact is a necessary evil to get funding. This might work if it was administered through the lifetime of the project (and beyond), but there seems to be no coherent approach. Once the funding is won, the pressure is off and serious collaboration aimed at delivering impact can be neglected.  Sustained collaboration requires shared goals and mutual benefit. For what its worth the governments impact agenda is the wrong way around. Interesting research should be funded on its own merits, but economic impact should be rewarded when it is demonstrated to have emerged from research, not when it is assumed that it will happen.

Familiarity breeds contempt, as the well known phrase goes, is entirely wrong here and perhaps Familiarity breeds collaboration would be better in this context.  The inner workings and mindsets of companies or institutions put up barriers to trust. Having individuals shared between these institutions is the best way of overcoming this difficulty. Exchanges of staff or multifaceted employees shared will make things happen and by pass these obstacles. We need more government funded schemes  to interlace people between industry and academic cultures. 

My experience of supervising a KTP project is very positive from the point of view of the company. This is because the structure forces regular communication between the parties and can be arbitrated by a third party who works on behalf of the government funder, overseeing the projects timescales and deliverables. It is not always attractive to the academics because it can be time consuming with not much space for extensive research. One of the important things to realise is that the companies often need access to what the academic does know, not what they will know (as a consequence of research.)  This is important because access to knowledge and its transfer is not really viable in any other way other than consultancy, and this extended interaction helps develop trust.

In Conclusion

It should definitely be made easier for industry to access academic expertise. After all their corporate and employee taxes helps fund the academic system. It seems a little harsh to expect them to pay twice for the privilege so there should be better means of funded access to university academics and resources. The funding should go to the academics who take part in these activities with the recognition that these more ‘mundane’ activities are actually important and should be supported to prove this. 

Academics need to better understand the industrial world and how it works. Better interactions are required between academic and industrial institutions but a cultural shift is also required and this will only come through incentives such as work based merits or impact credits when research is utilised.

Industry needs to better understand the benefits in all forms, of closer collaboration with academia, and this will require better promotion of these schemes. 

Impact and elitism

I cant beleive it's been a year since I last posted anything. This has been an indicator of a lack of time. As I now work at Aston University my commute to Birmingham takes 1hour 45 mins, so much of my day is taken up with travelling. Then when I get home I have to taxi my kids around so that they can have a social life. Hopefully all this will change soon when I move house and cut down the commute. There seems to be so many things to do and not enough time to fit them in.

Academia has proven to be an unstable place. Often it feels very unreal. There is a great murmuring about the importance of impact in the real world, but when it comes down to it, academics are not really interested  in making it happen. Impact is a duty, one of those things that you ought to do rather than want to do. Publishing an important paper is something you can keep with you and use as collateral to take to another job. Impact is something that the institution benefits from, so the incentives are not really there. There is talk about changing the way performance reviews are carried out so that real impact can aid in promotion. Actually there is a more deep seated problem of  cultural prejudice in academia. It's not just that impact is less interesting than research, it's that there is a scientific elitism.

Frances Saunders, the previous president of the Institute of Physics laid it out last year at the Photon14 conference in London. She explained how her career, which has been similar to my own, has been in the area of applied science. It has been to use the science to actually do something rather than postulate about what it could do before moving on to the next research topic. She described how  This approach is looked down upon by the majority of the scientific community. Have you looked at the impact factors of journals that might take applied sciece, in fact have you looked at the number of journals that actually publish applied physical science. Science is touted as the  driving force behind our economy, yet transition science that takes concepts and makes them practical, implementable and real is like the embarassing relative that no one wants to talk about. There is definitely an elitist attitude that blue sky, cutting edge science is the only science that matters.

Until we align the culture of scientific progress with real world impact, and recognise and reward it accordingly, there will always be this tension and true impact will creep rather than leap forward. I have now seen for myself how academics are like ferrets in a sack, squabbling and trying to get to the top. In my local environment at least there is very little interest in team work and the system does nothing to bolster the problem, it is everyone for themself and it is tax payers money that being treated as it is is academics by right. This is a big ship to steer and I cant see things changing much. The only way is for  people like me to become established and try and change the culture form the inside.

The 3 P's

I've been in academia now for over a month. Its been a bit of a culture shock for a number of reasons, that include the difference between academic freedom and industrial security, access to journals and a number of other things - mostly all postive things, just takes a little time to adjust. But the most concerning thing, which surprised me with its intensity, was just how much of a rat race it is. It's very much everyone for themself. I was expecting more of a team ethos, but I think the only way you get that is by proving you can attract money and people gravitate towards you. This surprised me because you could never get that to work in industry. If you are not a team player you wont last long unless people absolutely need what you do.
I recently bumped into a Prof from another university and informed him of my change of circumstances. His advice was to be aware of the 3 P's. Pounds, papers and PhD's - in that order. Money is the most important priority. It seems that academia is running itself with the priorities of the commercial world. Is this what we want of our academic institutions. They are desperate to make money, desperate to generate intellectual property that they can sell.  If you really want to generate economic impact with your research then the only way to do this is to give it away to commercial enitites that can do something with it. After all research is (generally) paid for by the tax payer - all of which originates from commercial enterprise in the form of income tax, corporation tax. So in a sense you make commercial entities buy back the work they have already paid for. Universities dont sell much and the process is time consuming and costly, which is exactly what you dont need if you want to commercialise and have impact.
So if I am going to make my way in academia I need to attract some money, and seeing as how I have little academic track record that is not likekly to come from research councils. So I am in the position that academia is keen to pursue , which is getting money from industry and other non academic bodies. For this at least I ought to have an advantage. Time will tell.

Through the looking glass

Having blogged a little about industrial research  and its relationship with industry, I am now going through the looking glass and am about to move to research in academia. I have mentioned before how difficult it has been to be considered for an academic position when you have been working in industry for so long and don’t have the academic record of and academic working in academia. I was then fortunate that a position intended to pursue research with a view to forging connections with industry became available. A position actually putting academics at a disadvantage as it required industrial research experience.
So I am soon to start and I shall be bringing to the role plenty of opinions about the problems that academics have with trying to collaborate with industry. Much of this will be the substance of future posts, so I don’t want to waste it all now, but there is certainly a big misalignment between what academia wants to do and what industry expects. Aligning these two views will take quite some effort and I dare say it will be academia that needs to budge.
Some universities are better than others at connecting with, talking to and working with industry. With a new emphasis by funding bodies on impact and exploitation , the industrial relationship is becoming more important to getting funding through traditional routes. An industrial colleague of mine recently visited a department at Cambridge University. He said that slowly it was beginning to dawn on them that they need to start seriously working out how they are actually going to get involved with industry. There was an innate arrogance about the place which had taken a bit of a hit when they did not get a grant renewed because another university had some commercial funding that had swayed the assessors to go with a university that was trying harder. Cambridge had assumed they would get funding because they were Cambridge.     There needs to be a change of culture in academia and there will be some aspect of Darwinian competition that's going to upset some people.
Now I happen to think that the EPSRC (the funding body for UK science research) has got some things badly wrong of late – such as concentrating all PhD’ s in doctoral training centres, and not allowing grant proposals to fund PhD students. These have dried up the lifeblood of research around UK institutions  and seriously reduced the base of creative innovation. But we are where we are and there is no denying that academic institutions need to grasp the nettle of culture change required to successfully integrate with industry and compete successfully for funded research.

is the academic and industrial research link working

The relationship between industry and academia is a varied and interesting one. I've seen it work well but I have also seen it go the other way. In a sort of ideal scenario then an academic would have a bright idea which would be investigated with grant funding. After a suitable period of investigation where the concept is proven it should be picked up by industry who will develop it into a practical realisation that can ultimately be sold. Everyones happy, the academic got funding to do some interesting work, the industry acquired something useful that they can sell. The industry didn't have to invest lots of its own money in a range of ideas that mostly did not work, but was able to pick the winner and put its resources behind it with confidence. The grant funding body is happy because it has successfully used tax payers money to good effect so that a commercial gain will boost the economy. Consumers are happy as they have something new to buy. The university may well have filed some intellectual property and will have some successful publications. All is well then, except it rarely works like that. Almost every grant proposal now must explain the impact of the work. How the results will be exploited so as to provide some economic benefit. Apparently every piece of research is going to do something significant. I wonder if anyone has correlated the pay offs against the promises. Does the country get value for money from its investment in research? I know that science should be done for the sake of knowledge, but exploitation is now part ot the exam question so is it working or not? Exploitation requires a proper relationship with industry, not just a cursory letter of support  with the grant proposal, but on going involvement. Small leverage of the project direction at the beginning can make a big difference at the end of the project to how easy to develop the idea is. Industry also has to be willing and able to get involved and stay involved. That can sometimes mean that industry needs some funding stream. This is an often neglected aspect. There is an assumption that industry is awash with money that it can throw around . There can be several reasons why this is not the case. Firstly small companies may not have any spare cash to risk. Larger companies may have more money, but for the industrial researchers they will have to make a business case to get internal funding to pursue academic relations. This is competed money and therefore the results have to be worth it. My experience is that timescales can be problem. Academia will offer a 3 year PhD whereas industry might want the product in 2 years. Timescales are the big disparity. Academia just does not have the people on tap to rapidly switch on a project. This is where the value of the researh organistions, such as the Faunhofer institutes should really start to showas you can get the best of both worlds. With industry and academia seemingly competing for the same funding streams it is ever more important that we collaborate to get the best out of everyone.

Industrial uniform

I recently attended a technical fayre and mini exhibition. As i walked around it was obvious who the business people were -they were the ones wearing suits. Technical types (such as me) and academics  rarely wear suits. So why do so many others ? The suit is a business uniform. The abence of a suit is also a kind of uniform. It is a kind of statement that says 'I'm more interested in the science than the business'  and that actually is the case. There is nothing wrong with that. You need people who are focussed on the science just as much as you need people who are focussed on the business, in order to provide a proper balance. But the odd thing is this; the suit is a visible credential , its almost as if in business you wouldn't trust someone who wasn't wearing a suit. And yet I distrust people more if they are wearing a suit.
Recently in hospital whilst looking after my injured child, I visited a cafe to get a drink. In the cafe was a person wearing a pinstripe suit and waistcoat. It was obvious they were in the hospital to sell stuff. It felt really inappropriate that someone was there is full view with the purpose of making a profit whilst the rest of us were only concerned about our sick children. I know that is irrational because everything that is used in the hospital results in profit for someone, and there is so much waste that selling to hospitals must be very profitable. But it just seemed a bit too in your face. Do business people feel they have a better chance of a sale if they are in a suit? Do they think that it is being disrespectful to the purchaser if they dont wear a suit? Do they think the customer wont buy from them without the suit?
In my company none of the technical people wear suits. Most of the commercial people do however. Even those that rarely leave the office or meet people outside of the company. Perhaps they are trying to instill into their colleagues the impression that they are  a professional, perhaps they are trying to instill into themselves the very same opinion. 
I think that in the technical community at least there is the opinion that the way I look does not affect the way I think. Obviously I have a lot of sympathy with point of view, but I also think that if the way you dress makes you feel more confident it will show through in what you do and how you interact. Equally so if wearing a suit makes you feel uncomfortable.