A new report from Lux Research investigates the value of industry/university partnerships for research in nanotechnology.
"When we scrutinized the collaborations between 20 companies on one side and 20 academic labs on the other, we found that technology transfer, IP issues, timing, and cost of resources could drive a wedge between the two just when opportunities are starting to materialize.” That's a quote from the press release that went out with a new report from Lux Research.
The author of quote, and of the report, David Lackner, also says that “Universities are still the best deal in town for access to talent and a fresh perspective, but companies using these collaborations as outsourced research groups can’t bend the professors – or students for that matter – to their commercial will.” So don't tear up those contracts just yet.
The report Making Industry/Academic Nanotech Partnerships Productive is one of those expensive productions that means we haven't seen the whole thing. So we can only list the highlights that appear in the press release which promises that the report "describes how companies can mitigate these differences by starting with the objective of the partnership and working backward to best practices".
They talked to 20 companies and 20 universities and concluded that:
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Companies and universities struggle with opposing goals. Large companies seek a range of outcomes from academic partnerships; start-ups want to meet product and patent milestones; large universities think the point of partnerships is creating jobs for researchers; and small universities prioritize publishing.
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Problems with technology transfer ranked as the number one challenge for industry/academic partnerships, with 71% of companies and 31% of universities interviewed emphasizing that particular struggle.
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29% of companies complained that unforeseen costs of collaboration – in IP licensing fees, legal fees, and extra work hours – eventually add up to much more than the value of the research that the academics conduct.
A lot of this is pretty mainstream wisdom from the university/industry scene, but no less relevant for that. Indeed, as they focussed on nanotechnology, and talked to people in that sector, the full document may well have some specific advice for those in this rapidly growing, and much hyped, area.
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