How to Create Productive Partnerships With Universities
uiin.org
Quoted on this wiki
Every place a page here uses this source, in the order the words come in it.
How to Create Productive Partnerships With Universities SUMMER 2012 VOL.53 NO.4 REPRINT NUMBER 53417 Markus Perkmann and Ammon Salter “Working with external partners allows them to access different pools of knowledge and save r&D costs.” the pharmaceutical companies novartis, Glaxosmithkline, Merck and Pfizer have invested together in open science initia- tives even though they are otherwise fierce competitors. suMMer 2012 MIt sloan ManaGeMent reVIeW 79
In Partnerships
the pharmaceutical companies novartis, Glaxosmithkline, Merck and Pfizer have invested together in open science initia- tives even though they are otherwise fierce competitors. suMMer 2012 MIt sloan ManaGeMent reVIeW 79 “companies can sometimes find universities too slow and too bureaucratic to be good partners.” short-term collaborations are useful, common and relatively easy to facilitate if they are targeted and aligned to universities’ and academics’ ways of working. However, they require creative structuring, as the clock speed of academic research and business practice can be wildly diver- gent. Conversely, many academics think long-term, and this can be an advantage for a business as it may overcome managers’ tendency to look to the next quarter. “going long” with academics in the search for new ideas can unlock a range of possibilities and even help to create a new innovation ecosystem that will sustain the business five or 10 years into the future. However, such long-term collaborations require more patient investment and managerial attention to the design and governance of the col- laboration or they can go easily awry. The second dimension is the degree of disclo- sure of the results of the partnership. openness facilitates rapid publishing, which constitutes the lifeblood of public science7 and has the advantage of reducing transaction costs related to intellectual property. For companies, however, protection fa- cilitates the commercialization of discoveries. if we combine these two dimensions, we can see four different collaboration modes: 1. The idea lab, where managers put aside their de- sire for secrecy and work with academics to create new options and contacts. 2. The grand challenge, where managers and aca- demics work together to create a new knowledge base that will be shared in the public domain. 3. The extended workbench, where managers work rapidly with university partners on proprietary problems and solutions. 4. Deep exploration, where the company creates rich and long-lasting relationships with univer- sity partners that, in turn, offer the business rights of first refusal to license collaboration re- sults. (see “Four models of University-industry Collaboration.”) 1.
82 MIt sloan ManaGeMent reVIeW suMMer 2012R E S E A R C H A N D D E V E L O P M E N T COURTeSy OF HewLeTT-PACkARD COMPANy at over 70 different institutions in 20 countries. How should companies undertake such short- term open explorations? First, it is important for companies to explain the problems in a way that will help academics work toward useful solutions. sec- ond, contracts with the university should be kept as simple as possible. Third, the emphasis in managing the project should not be on timely delivery, but on the results. academics also appreciate it when the project is not overly specific, leaving them with dis- cretion as to the methods and objectives. obviously, there are risks associated with this type of collaboration. From a company’s perspec- tive, outcomes are likely to be highly skewed, with a number of projects that will yield some results but that will not necessarily produce eureka moments, and a number of failures. However, if a series of proj- ects are pursued in a portfolio, this risk can be mitigated, in part because the cost of each project is rather low. an executive at a major oil company told us that he was happy if 20% of such exploratory projects resulted in some positive output after two years. The unsuccessful 80% are terminated. a further risk is that a company may fail to ab- sorb the lessons from these kinds of projects, as in many cases follow-on projects are required to gain the full benefit of the research. To ensure that these risks are overcome, managers should seek to deepen and extend the most promising relation- ships by assigning an internal champion to work alongside the external academic partner and creat- ing a more long-term arrangement. 2. open, long-term: Grand Challenges Working on open and long-term “grand challenges” is the sweet spot for most academics, who often thrive on big problems. “Companies, too, can capitalize on this kind of collaboration, provided the objectives are well defined and the interaction is carefully gov- erned.” such follow-on knowledge creation can be a powerful mechanism for shaping open source platforms, at- tracting others to certain norms and standards and thereby seeding a new innovation ecosystem.14 For example, after arup group ltd., a leading engi- neering firm, decided to launch a new fire engineering service group in the late 1990s, it in- vested in a long-term program with universities to generate a new innovation ecosystem around building fire safety. (see “How arup Fire invested in a new innovation ecosystem.”) a further rationale for funding open, long-term university initiatives is to address fundamental chal- lenges that are of high social relevance, such as the environment or energy. For instance, oil companies have funded large programs on various forms of al- ternative energy or carbon abatement. one example is a five-year grand challenge on cleaner fossil fuels between royal Dutch shell and imperial College london. launched in 2007, the project focuses on every year, hP labs solicits ideas from academics on selected research projects with the aim of building new research collaborations.
In Partnerships
SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU SUMMER 2012 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 85 emerge rather than arriving after the problem has al- ready taken hold. Some companies use open “idea lab” projects to form new contacts. While it is important to seek out and maintain re- lationships with individual academics, they are bound by university policies, and it is a good idea to ensure that all activities are aligned with the relevant outreach entity. For instance, many universities have consultancy service offices that are experienced in drawing up contracts and offer professional indem- nity insurance coverage. For larger projects, most universities have business partnership units or in- dustry liaison programs that take care of the contractual and administrative side of collabora- tions, help recruit sponsors and liaise with academics and departments, acting as a centralized point of contact for the university and its industrial partners. These outreach offices have helped to professionalize the nature of university engagement with compa- nies, often facilitating and catalyzing connections. In many cases, such activities are pursued from within the technology transfer offices18 that will also be re- sponsible for dealing with any intellectual property arising from their projects.19 Despite this, contract research agreements with universities can be complicated to set up.20 Some- times the communication between academic teams and the outreach offices is less than ideal, rendering the process bureaucratic and slow. Universities can also be overly optimistic about the value of the intel- lectual property that may arise from the collaboration, even though only a minority of collaborative univer- sity-industry projects results in patentable output.21 In order to avoid such conflicts, managers should proactively seek to build relationships with univer- sity outreach offices. “These agreements offer a set of model contracts and a rapid-fire system for launching contract research agreements.” 86 MIt sloan ManaGeMent reVIeW suMMer 2012R E S E A R C H A N D D E V E L O P M E N T COURTeSy OF ROLLS-ROyCe and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in israel. To address a related challenge, intel has recently been working with a nonprofit entity called University- industry research Corp. as the single contracting and funding intermediary between industry spon- sors and universities in its larger centers and institutes. This allows the company to provide a more scalable approach to adding new sponsors and universities to its large institutes, while enforcing a consistent governance model and avoiding an undue administrative burden for its partner universities. 4. Protected, long-term: deep exploration long-term, deep and protected collaborations with universities enable companies to not only create new knowledge, but also to gain competitive ad- vantage from the outputs of these research efforts. such efforts usually involve major investments in labs or centers, where the industrial sponsor has the right of first refusal to an exclusive license to pat- entable ideas emerging from the lab. This approach allows the researchers to do the long-term work they do best, and the company to preempt its com- petitors from accessing the downstream application of these ideas. rolls-royce Holdings plC is an example of a company that has applied the “deep exploration” ap- proach. Twenty years ago, the company established the first rolls-royce University Technology Centres with universities in Britain. Today, rolls-royce runs about 30 such centers around the globe, from the United states to China. each of the centers focuses on a specialized area of technological expertise, such as combustion, aerodynamics, noise and vibration or manufacturing technology. This allows the com- pany to maintain centers of excellence that are more resourceful and specialized than it would be able to justify internally.