Prof. Cyrus Shahabi
Director IMSC
Title: Academic research centers and Industry: Can they work together?
Time: Thursday March
8th; 4-5:30pm
Panel Topic:
One of the main challenges of large academic research centers is to engage corporate partners in their research and technology transfer activities. Sometimes this is specifically requested by the funding agencies (e.g., the NSF Engineering Research Center program) but regardless everybody agrees that it is important to have industry involved in research. It will ensure the researchers tackle real-world problems; it facilitates the transfer of the technology towards a more tangible and perhaps quicker impact; and it will avoid researchers reinvent the wheel. The industry would also benefit by getting direct access to research results, students and other academic resources. In some cases, the industry partner can also influence the research topics and even acquire IP and certain rights. This is perhaps the reason that companies funded over $4 billion of university research in US in 2009, according to Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM)[1].
Various models, some very successful, have been practiced in the past. At one end, we have the center membership model where the corporate partner pays an annual fee and receive generic benefits and at the other end, we have directed-research models where industry provides (sometimes in-kind) support and receives customized code, IP and/or reports.
In this panel, we would like to hear the views of the panelist and the participants on this topic. To initiate some thoughts, here are some questions to ponder upon:
I. What are the benefits an industry partner would like to get from a research center?
II. What are the benefits a research center would like to get from an industry partner?
III. What are the potential conflicts?
IV. What are the risks and threats in these partnerships?
V. What
are the differences between research in academia and industry, and
how they can complement each other?
VI. What are the successful collaboration models? Can they be readily copied?