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.