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.
